The Image above is the contest image. To see a larger version of it, please go to Uwe’s web site and get it from there.

 

Before “attacking the image” I tried to assess my feelings about it. To me images are emotions, Weston used to say that he couldn’t take a picture if something inside him was not moved. I feel very close to this statement.

 

This is what I wrote to Uwe describing my approach to his image:

 

"There are three different levels that I can see in the image, the lake, calm, the vegetation with the dark and light areas and then the mountain rising towards the bright clouds.

What I really like is the darker areas, where the vegetation is thicker. These trees are old, keep secrets, something sleeps there. I did not feel like waking it up. I tried to respect the original and not overdo the adjustments.

What I tried to pull out was the detail in the trees, the light on the hills. The original had a blueish cast which I removed, and tried to recover detail in the clouds."

 

Let’s see how that works in LightZone:

 

The original image looks quite flat probably due to the haze at the time of the shot. What I felt like doing was to work mostly on the clouds and on the trees on the hills.

 

An image like that is flat locally, i.e. on the trees, but it jas a huge dynamic range that needs to be domesticated:

Basically the sky is too bright, any adjustment on the rest of the image (Uwe asked us not to use masks for this contest) would probably blow the hilights. To cope with this I first applied a contrast mask:

Contrast Mask is a cool tool that effectively reduces the global contrast on the image, I used the default settings and I increased the opacity a bit until the sky looked OK. Now the histogram looks like this:

Notice that this histogram is in “Zone Scale”, which is a logarithmic scale calibrated in 1/2 EV. For reference the fifth segment from the right corresponds to medium gray. The image looks a lot more tractable now:

Next step is the real thing, tone mapping. First of all I set the black point, you can see from the histogram that the image is too light. Second I try and expand the dynamic range of the tree area on the hills. Both operations are done by looking at the Zone Finder and adjusting the Zone Mapper segments accordingly.

 

In the following screenshots I concentrate on a detail of the trees on the hill and show how contrast is enhanced:

I used the visual feedback from the ZoneFinder to identify the zones in which the trees originally fall, you can see that everything happens in about two stops of dynamic range.

 

Using the Zone Mapper I expanded the original dynamic range of the tree area (the four middle segments), pulled down the black point (the bottom segment) and added some pop on the highlights (top segment).

 

You can see how much more detail is recovered in the trees, the trunks gain depth and the foliage has an entirely new dimension.

 

The next steps involved adding a white balance tool to warm up the color temperature, this was done using my eyes, it is the equivalent of using a warming filter on your camera. I also increased saturation a bit to have less muted colors.

 

I was still not satisfied with the image, not enough global contrast. So I used the “sunglasses” trick, I added a Channel Mixer layer to convert the image to black and white and filtered the image to have more information coming from the green channel and less from the red and blue (I set the blue channel to a negative value). Then I changed the blending mode of the layer to “Soft Dodge”. The result is like wearing green tinted sunglasses and having your eyes do the white balance adjustment.

Zone Finder on the tree area before applying the Zone Mapper

Zone Finder on the tree area after applying the Zone Mapper

Zone Mapper settings

Detail of the tree area before applying the Zone Mapper

Detail of the tree area after applying the Zone Mapper

Now this seems like a lot of work, but it actually took something ten minutes to get it done. Where the time was spent was in developing a plan, deciding what to do and than just doing it.

 

You can see the finished image at the beginning of this tutorial or on Uwe’s site, where you can download the original image and my lzn file with the changes.

The image on the left is before applying the “sunglasses” effect, on the right after. You can see how much detail is recovered in the clouds. The image gets a bit darker as a result, so I added another another Zone Mapper to lighten up the mid tones.

 

Finally, I added a sharpening layer with a largish radius (5.5) and low amount (44) to increase local contrast in the Image.