Eklutna Lake at Dawn

Take the photo to the right. In its original form, it’s pretty good. Flat lighting, but that’s due to the haze and fog. For full rendering, however, it really needed to have a few things brought out.  The mountain in the background was barely visible, for example.  There was a yellow haze over the mountain, and due to exposing for that large amount of white, the grasses in the foreground had lost a lot of their saturation.  To make things worse, I had a large smudge over part of the mountain (I later found a fingerprint on the back piece of glass on my lens – dunno how that got there!).

So, for editing: I smoothed out the histogram in Adobe Raw, using minor tweaks to contrast, clarity, and exposure until I had a good base image.  Then, to Photoshop:

• Bring in the mountains: I used the dodge and burn tools (something I rarely do) to bring in the peak in the background.  There wasn’t much detail there, but it wasn’t really needed.  In this case, it’s the idea of a mountain that’s important.
• Remove yellows from the smudge: Burning in colors included burning in yellows.  I swapped over to the sponge tool (set to desaturate), and lightly went over the burned-in haze.  This left in the smudge, but it’s no longer a blob of smog.
• Remove the smudge altogether: the smudge covered part of the peak, so I couldn’t get away with the easier tools (healing brush, patch tool).  This requires heavy-duty work.  Fortunately contours were visible.  I built back in the sky around the mountains using a light touch on the clone tool (set to lighten).  Then I smoothed out the smudge in the mountain, using the same settings.  This was tricky, needing to find a similar structure to not blow anything out.  Finally, minor spot touch up with the healing brush.
• Bring back light to the grasses: this was a natural job for NIK’s Viveza tool, and that’s what I used.  Four control points spread along the grass, set very slightly up for brightness (+6%) and contrast (+8%), and saturation (+8%).
• Brighten the water: still in Viveza, with four more control points.  In this case, contrast was moved up to 12%, brightness to 8%.  That was enough.
• Remove noise: This was a handheld image, so I had a faster ISO going when I took it.  To get around that, my next-to-final step was to run NIK Dfine 2.  Defaults were fine.

After that, it was just a matter of resizing, sharpening, and saving.

This is possibly my favorite shot from that camping trip – very “Lord of the Rings” – or so it seems to me…