A Calving Glacier

Here’s a situation that happened to me last week, on the 6th full day of a South-East Alaska cruise: we’re sailing through fog, right up to the Hubbard Glacier.  When we get up to it, everything is spectacular – calving at regular intervals (that’s the breaking off of ice into the ocean), deep blues… how to show this?

Well, even with proper exposure, you’ll end up with a fairly flat, even grey pic.  The problem is that everything is a dingy white, and the sensor will try to dirty it down. You can alter your exposure, but it won’t really matter – you’ll still end up with a flat image, short on the color that you actually see.

In the case of this picture, here are the steps to resurrecting it:

• Tweak around the general exposure & some of the contrast in Adobe Raw.  Don’t overdo it.
• Open in Photoshop, and duplicate (<cmd/ctrl>-J) the bottom layer.
• Open levels (<cmd/ctrl>-L), and bring in the high & low markers to fringe the actual histogram (to the very edges of where it starts).
• Open Viveza and drop points across the sky.  Desaturate slightly and darken.
• Drop points across the ice, too.  Increase saturation (very slightly) and contrast.
• Resize, sharpen and save.

In this case, I took it a little overboard on the glacier.  This was deliberate – otherwise the splash from falling ice gets completely lost.