Haven't been active on DPChallenge for ages, but I've decided its time to come back home where I learnt everything.
Photo taken at sunrise in the Blue Mountains near the 3 Sisters. I was taking photos of the fog in the valley for a more wide angle landscape, and noticed this little patch of trees across the valley with sunlight streaming across. Only lasted a little while, but took quite a few exposures and chose this one.
Editing:
1) clone out power lines in the background and a cable car in the corner with associated cables.
2) Clean up tree line to make it a little more uniform at the back using clone stamp tool
3) convert to B/W (red filter)
4) Painted on a 50% neutral gray layer to really accentuate the rays streaming through
5) USM with big radius, 0 threshold. This is really what made the photo pop, lots of midtone contrast added here, and probably the key to the edit
6) Vignette with levels
----Post Challenge-----
Thanks everyone for the votes and comments, and its great to be back! Looks like the telephoto does in fact make for a landscape lens :)
I think the image looks nicer in Sepia (see below), but wasn't sure what the feeling towards Sepia toned in a BW challenge would be, so I went with this version. Which version do you prefer?
Statistics
Place: 2 out of 126 Avg (all users): 6.9300 Avg (commenters): 8.0909 Avg (participants): 6.8542 Avg (non-participants): 7.0000 Views since voting: 2665 Views during voting: 219 Votes: 100 Comments: 18 Favorites: 4 (view)
Congrats on the ribbon! Breathtaking magic in this scene.
I appreciate the editing steps, very interesting to know how you accentuated the rays. Wish I knew this for my own image :-).
Sunrise streaming through the forest
Add photograph to your favorites
Add photographer to your favorites
Photographer found comment helpful.
