I spent some time this afternoon tweaking a couple photos from last week's ride to the summit of Mt. Diablo. This is part of that digitial darkroom learning curve I mentioned earlier. Here's a before and after look at a landscape shot:
Before:
(click for larger image)
After:
It doesn't look like much of a change, but you can see a lot more detail in the fog and on the horizon. This is a result of trial and error with PhotoShop's Shadow/Highlight sliders. As its name implies, this tool allows you to independently adjust the levels of the shadows and highlights. I have no idea what I'm really doing, so my technique is to perform a binary search of sorts by dragging each slider back and forth until I see a result I like. It takes several passes through because some of the sliders control parameters that affect the other sliders, but it's usually fairly obvious where the sweet spot lies. The trick in this scene was to pump up the contrast while preserving as much tonal subtlety as possible.
Unfortunately the sky is completely blown out because I forgot to check the camera's ISO setting, and of course I had left it at 1600 from my previous shooting session. My biggest gripe about the D70 is that there is no convenient way to manage groups of settings. I just need get into a routine of resetting every parameter before I set out, or something. I suppose I could crop out the top part, but I kind of like how the clouds in the upper left mirror the fog in the lower right, and it adds to the otherworldly mood of the scene. Yeah, that's the ticket.
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