Unprocessed: Stony Lough Eske

If today’s photograph looks familiar, it is probably because I posted a colour version of the same image last week.  As I discussed last week, because conditions weren’t ideal for landscape photography at the time, the image needed some work in post-processing to create both last week’s colour version and today’s monochrome version.  Today I “unprocess” this image, and reprocess it in a step-by-step way so that not only do you see the final image, but you get to see what I started with and exactly how I got from there to the end result.

You’ll possibly know already from last week’s post that the photograph was taken on the shore of Lough Eske, and I was in the area to attend (and photograph) the wedding of two friends.  I didn’t really intend on doing landscape photography during the trip – my focus was on wedding photography – but the scene caught my eye and warranted the few minutes it took to capture it on camera.   Whether it would justify the extra minutes post-processing required to get to the final image was going to depend on how I did that post-processing.

What follows may well make a landscape photographer cringe.  It may seem to you like the absolute wrong way to go about processing the source image.  And you may hate the end result.  Or you might love it.  For what it’s worth, I’m somewhere between these two extremes regarding this image, but like it more than I don’t, if that makes sense.

So that disclaimer out of the way, here is what I started with:

And here is how I created it.

• Take the image straight from the camera and create three versions – one at the exposure as shot, one that is two stops underexposed, and one that is two stops overexposed
• Import these three versions into Photomatix and merge them using the most photo-realistic settings
• Play with the white balance of this new version to give the image a cooler tone
• Use the “Recover” slider to pull back lost detail from totally blown out highlights
• Tweak the contrast, definition and saturation (ever so slightly) to give the image a little more oomph
• Apply a medium-strength S-curve to get the contrast across the image to where I want it
• Use the highlight and shadow recovery sliders to bring back some detail lost in the previous step
• Apply quite a strong vignette (because I’ve been in that kind of mood recently)
• Convert the image to monochrome using the channel mixer, taking care not to overexpose the result by ensuring all channels add up to 100% exactly.

And because a picture is worth a thousand words (not that you’d know it on this blog usually!) you might find the following more visual guide to the processing on this image a little more informative.  It runs for one minute, shows you the image after each stage listed above, and hopefully gives you a feel for how each affects the image and influences the final result.  Click on the image or the play button below to start the slideshow.

I’m hoping you’ll appreciate that the actual numbers, percentages, slider positions don’t matter too much here and that it is the steps that are most informative.  After all, how much I apply each adjustment by is absolutely a matter of taste as much as the end result is.

PS: Apologies to those on iPhones because the visual reprocessing above is powered by Flash, so you’ll have to rely on the text descriptions… at least until you can revisit this page using a Flash-compatible device.