LightZone Tutorial 2: Landscape
In April of 2005 I took a workshop in Death Valley with Steve Kossak. I have a bunch of beautiful images that have been sitting on my hard drive for almost a year now and I finally have some time to go back to them and discover some real jewels.
 
Here is a view from Dante’s Peak captured with my Canon 20D:
LightZone Tutorial 2: Landscape
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Here is the final image. I really like it. Using LightZone I could revisit the image I saw on the mountain a year ago and find out why I took this picture in the first place.
This is a plain import of the RAW file, no default adjustments have been applied. As you can see the image appears very flat, looking at the Zone Finder preview below we can see that everything happens in a couple of stops:
Using the Zone Mapper we can very easily “pull apart” the zones where the “action” is, revealing lots of beautiful detail:
The image has a new life already. Still something has not been revealed yet. The slanted formations on the peak on the right have lots of interesting things to say, same applies to the hazy view of the valley on the top left, I added another Zone Mapper layer to deal with the hilights and to add some more punch to the mid tones:
Here we go, life is sparkling in the hilights, the mountain reveals its character and its age, the valley becomes a beautifully textured backdrop. Looking at the Zone Finder preview below we can see that the new rendering of the image now spans across more than five stops:
The image needs some final touches, more saturation in the colors (40%) and some sharpening to reveal additional detail in the rock formations. There were a couple of sensor dust spots in the top right of the image that I removed using the Clone tool.