Carlingnose Point

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This was a bit of a disaster if truth be told. I set my alarm for 4:45am intending to go to Dunbar for a sunrise at the old harbour. Sadly I forgot to actually turn the thing on! Anyway, I woke up late 5:30am so decided to go to Carlingnose Point instead as I’d stand a better chance of getting there in time. I usually like to arrive a good 30 minutes before sunrise but this time I was only about 10 minutes early. The whole morning felt kind of rushed and I didn’t particularly enjoy it.

I was having particular problems with the exposure compensation. For some reason with the Sigma 10-20 I was doing my usual +0.33EV but when I put on my Sigma 18-50 it was underexposing like crazy. I can only assume I wasn’t really paying attention to the position of my filters and that was causing the huge fluctuations.

Whatever the cause I found it really distracting and it kind of ruined the morning for me – not to mention the shots.

Shooting

I didn’t stack my filters this time. Simply used a LEE 0.9 ND soft grad

The shot above is made up of 2 frames from a bracketed set of 3 exposures at +/- 1.33EV. I ditched the +1.33EV frame as there wasn’t really much use for it – there was nothing dark in the frame I wanted detail in.

Here’s the two frames I used straight out of the camera: -

0EV

-1.33EV

Post Processing

My work flow goes from Bridge > ACR > Bridge > Photoshop

The post processing for this shot was quick and simple – for me.  According to the date/times on the files, from RAW processing to saving took 16 minutes. That’s fast! ;)

RAW Processing

Talking of RAW processing. For 0EV I did an “Auto” levels in ACR while on the -1.33EV layer I brought set the Exposure slider by “-1.00″ and the Recovery to “+28″

Next up I selected both layers and set the Vibrance to “+24″. For once I even remembered to do the Lens Correction to compensate for the Chromatic Aberration of the Sigma 10-20.

That pretty much sums up the RAW processing.

The usual thing to do in ACR when done is to click the “Open Images” button at the bottom right. Because I stack my exposures in Photoshop layers I do a slightly different thing. I click “Done” then in Bridge go to “Tools | Photoshop | Load Files into Photoshop Layers”. This creates a new Photoshop document with the exposures stacked and nicely named.

DRI + Effects

The next stage of my processing is to blend the layers together. Normally I spend ages with the layer masks, painting in the parts of each exposure I want to keep. This time though I went for the quick approach.

Not much in the way of effects for this. I set the -1.33EV layer to “Multiply” mode. This immediately boosted the colour and darkened everything. Too much. So I disabled the layer. Pressed ctrl + clicked on the RGB channel. That selected the highlights. From the layer mask for -1.33EV I deleted the selection. This creates a greyscale version of the image on the mask. I then set the “Feather” on the “Masks” panel to 250px. This then blurs the mask hugely.

The effect of the layer mask was to tone down the “Multiply” mode massively except on the highlights.

Next I stamped everything to a new layer (ctrl+shift+alt+e) and did a smart sharpen, slapped on my watermark and added the border.

Job done.

You can see the rest of the shots from this trip here.