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The skeleton coast is a great place to take photographs in… if you are there at the right time and the right spot. If you are not lucky enough to live close by, and end up with a photo opportunity at the wrong time of day, we can help. We aren’t all sponsored by the BBC to wait around for that perfect day. The skeleton coast has some great contrasts, which make it an attractive destination for photographers. Have you ever wondered about those amazing photographs you see in travel magazines? Well, lets “magazine-worthy” our kitsch photograph. :) Like the tree in the lake in New Zealand, the dead trees in Sossusvlei dooievlei are photographed to death. Don’t believe me? Look for the images in your favourite browser.
Our challenge is to get our image to the same quality as these professional photographs. However, our picture is rather “flat”. This is due to the bright sun in the summer, when you pray for a cloud … aaand obviously taking it at the wrong time of day, but we won’t go there. It’s time for super open-source software to the rescue. Just so you know, there are no monthly / yearly license fees either!
Now if we look at some of these examples I have in my search, you will see that the sky looks unnatural. We don’t want that. That is obviously something like an auto edit or a really bad hand edit. The same with the pictures where the sky and the dune join to make a lighter color…
Our picture is all faded colors, so one would think that is where you should start. There is a reason exposure is the first tab. It is meant to be your first stop. Our histogram gives us a clue, leaning toward the right. We also have some null space on the left, meaning we can play with the shadows as well. Just by sticking to basic editing, no advance nothing, we can immediately improve the look and feel of our shot. We drop our exposure into the negatives and play with contrast and saturation. Until our picture is life-like. Our histogram should separate nicely into red / green / blue (ignoring the outlier) and settle in the middle, whilst the darker tones sort themselves out as the histogram centres.
The TL;DR version is: don’t overthink it. You don’t keep searching for your car keys once you have found them.
One can see that the makers of this awesome open-source editor thought about how a photo gets edited, before putting the interface together. You do not need to be a master if things are logical and straightforward, just like you do not need to be a chef to bake a bread if you have a recipe and a method. Experience will take you the other half of the way.
You may want to add some highlights, but try to stick to: less is more. So let’s move to detail. Just turning on sharpenc, did the trick for me, though I will refer back to it once I turn on and check my local contrast. Again, just turning on local contrast did the trick. Let’s face it, there isn’t much going on in this picture, so when the dead tree popped, I stopped. Poetic, I know …
Moving on to color. We have a lot of color noise. The reason is because of the time period this picture was taken in. Space was at a premium and a 2GB SD card cost the same as a 64GB card costs today, so raw was not an option. The jpeg algorithm back then was also not as efficient as it is now, neither were the image processors. We have already discussed how to deal with color noise, so I will not repeat it.
Since there is not much I can do about the colors here, I head straight for vibrance. Step up the pastel tones, but don’t overdo it. Instead of grabbing and moving the slider , use the + button. Slowly tease the life out of the photograph. The blue sky may hint towards the unnatural, but we will look at correcting that in another tutorial. :)
You can now jump to transform and select your lens correction. Since this was an older camera, my lens was listed, but if yours is not listed, you can import your LCP file. Full instructions here: https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/How_to_get_LCP_and_DCP_profiles
So now we have vibrant color, we have sharpened the image, and we have our highlights and shadows sorted. However if we look at the sand, we notice that this is not Arrakis, there is detail in the dune. We want to draw attention to it, making it stand out more, making our image more “real”. Head back to exposure ( you have now gone full circle *wink.), and turn on tone mapping. You *may see something happen. We are going to adjust only the edge stopping feature. Move the slider up until the marks in the dune start to pop. Zoomed in all the way, you want to see the pock marks, the stones, and the weeds. The compromise you must make is near and far. Remember to check the ground nearest to you and the ground furthest away from you, and get that detail balance. If you have never been, to give you an idea, that is a group of people on the dune in the background.
We can now save our editing profile in the top right and apply it to the next image taken in the same region, helping us speed along our workflow.
Tip: work in small increments if you want your images to remain “natural”, take giant leaps if you want shock and awe art pieces.
Our final image is right up there with the shots proudly displayed on the internet, and we did not have to hang around for the ‘perfect’ opportunity.
I hope you had fun if you followed along and I hope you learned something.
Disclaimer: In no way am I an expert in photo manipulation, I just know a guy who had a dog that gave me some fleas. I thought I may help you scratch an itch also.
As always, if you have any questions or comments, send them to: misc@fullcirclemagazine.org