Lympa Cape Mendocino Punta Gorda Photoshop Layers Gary Todoroff

Lympa Log - Leica R lenses on Olympus E-330 DSLR

January 12, 2007

New Year's Eve Last Light - Follow up

On the previous web page I described my New Year's Eve drive to remote Cape Mendocino along the Pacific Ocean. An e-mail in response to that page commented on the vista to the south. Oliver said, "One of my favorite views in all of the American west is just south of the Cape, coming downhill toward the coast, with that long sweeping pastoral view."

His comment prompted me to review my photos from the evening, where I had indeed taken a shot of Oliver's scene from the side of the road, just before beginning my hike. Using the aerial photo above for reference, I took the photograph while standing on the side of the road at the far right just beyond the sunlight with the camera aiming south or to the right.

Actually, I took two photos, a couple seconds apart in order to capture the wide contrast range of the setting sun and the detailed foreground. The camera was set for two stops underexposure for the sky and two stops overexposure for the grass and brush. The effect is a digital equivalent to using a graduated gray filter that lets less light though at the top half of the lens.

I believe photographers are learning to "pre-visualize" with this technique, among other digital capabilities -- similar to how Ansel Adams saw scenes as a full-tone black and white print. Adams used the zone system with its complex exposure and film development techniques to enhance the contrast range of a negative and the resulting print. In a less technical way, I am beginning to see scenes as Photoshop pixels, learning to capture the data in an exposure that will give a result with an exceptionally wide contrast range. The camera becomes a digital collection box of exceptional amounts of raw photographic material.

Adams also used the musical analogy to say that the negative was the score and the print was the performance. While most of us strummed the darkroom equivalent of a ukulele, Adams had full command of a string quartet. Today, I think he would have considered Photoshop as a symphonic orchestra!

With the "score" of two digital files that captured both ends of extreme contrast, I then "performed" the harmony with Photoshop:

The point of land on the far left horizon is Punta Gorda. Moving forward, a section of the Mattole Road runs through the pastures of Cape Ranch. I am standing near the road on the southern flank of Cape Mendocino as the winter sun sets in the Southwest. The Live View LCD came to the rescue again when I was able to place the tripod on the other side of a barbed wire fence for a better perspective. With the camera at an arms length away, I was able to see the composition in the LCD without needing to put my eye up to the viewfinder.

Olympus E-330 with Zuiko 7-14mm/4 at 7mm zoom, ISO100 RAW capture, mirror lockup and tripod. Sky photographed at 1/320th second, f8, -2 EV, foreground at 1/25, f8 +2 EV.

Slight optical shifts can occur at different f-stops, so two sandwiched photos like this should be exposed at the same f-stop, only using shutter speeds to affect exposure.

See text below for how the two images were combined in Photoshop.

In Photoshop, I opened both the overexposed and underexposed photos, making slight exposure adjustments in the Olympus RAW plugin. With Control-A, I selected the entire underexposed (sky) photo and then dragged it to the overexposed (grass) Photoshop window. Grass was the "Background" and sky became "Layer 1". On Layer one I added a "Vector mask" by clicking the circle-in-rectangle window at the bottom of the layers palette. In the layers palette, that creates a little white box next to the sky image little box in Layer 1. Then Alt-Click the white box and it enlarges to a big white box. Use Edit, Fill, Black, 100% to completely fill the white mask with black. Now with the black mask, no effect from the sky layer shows at all on the screen (black "masks" any effect of Layer 1 on the Background layer). The purpose of the mask is to now selectively bring the dramatic sky into the photograph. Using gradient and brush tools, I was able to "paint" white and shades of gray on the vector mask in Layer 1 to bring the dramatic sky into the overall photograph. The resulting photograph captures several more stops of contrast than is normally possible with one piece of film or one digital exposure.