Never Retreat, Never Surrender

It started out like any other Saturday morning. Wake up early, make some coffee, head to the darkroom, and process a week’s worth of images. This has been my standard operating procedure for the last couple of months and it seems to work pretty well. I will dive into my holding project entitled “On Deck” and grab and couple of stacks that I want to process and post for the next week. Everything is quiet, the coffee is bottomless (which isn’t necessarily a good thing), and I’m taking a stroll down memory lane as I review images and remember the great times while making them. I was on my second cup of coffee when I began to process this image. I finished it well after the coffee pot was empty. Not only were the clouds a bit of a struggle, the canyon walls (both left and right) were riddled with Chromatic Aberration. The left side was plagued with magenta fringing on the vertical lines and the right side was spotted with a touch of blue fringing. To solve this problem, I processed the images where the problem was prevalent. This was the the two overexposed captures from the bracketed sequence. However, the CA really became an issue because once the right side was corrected, the left side was worse and vice-versa . Eventually I was able to establish a reasonable balance and carried on with my standard HDR/Tonemapping process. Now that I think about it, I might have been better served to process each problem image biased towards the specific CA fringing (one for magenta the other for blue) and then blended the two images together prior to processing. Hmm…a more appropriate tile would have been, Never Retreat, Never Surrender, and Hindsight is 20/20? Next time!

Scene: This image of the Canyonlands National Park, outside of Moab Utah, was shot on a short hike, about half way down from the mesa above.

Capture Notes:

Nikon D300
Tokina 11-16 ATX Pro
Gitzo Traveler

Aperture: f/22.0
Focal Length: 11 mm
ISO Speed: 200

Processing Note:

Capture – 8 images @ 1EV
Adobe Camera Raw – Raw conversion (CA correction on 2 images)
NX2 – Raw conversion on 5 images
Photomatix 3.2.9 – HDR/Tonemapping
NIK Define 2.0 – Noise reduction
Photoshop – Curves adjustment global
Nik Color Efex Pro – Tonal contrast
Photoshop – Lens correction (CA fix)
Nik Define 2.0 – Noise reduction selective to sky.
Nik Color Efex Pro – Correct color cast, still wasn’t happy, so I cooled it down a bit.
Sized For Web
Nik Sharpener 2.0 – Display 50%
LightAsMagic.com
….ugghhhhhh