L’heure magique L’heure magique or magic hour is the first and last “hour” of sunlight so called for the “magical” quality of light during this time period. This picture was taken less than an hour before sunset. It has the soft, diffuse warm tones, which is characteristic of images captured during magic hour.
Taking the Shot This was a totally serendipitous find. It was taken during a hike to Mission Peak (Fremont, CA) where I also captured my entry for the “Bovines” challenge. I was exhausted from the 2.5 hour hike but I was still running downhill because I only had a little more than an hour to go before 9PM (rollover time here in California). At the bottom of the hill, the weeds glistening in the sun captured my attention and I just couldn’t resist stopping. I thought it would go really well with my Weeds collection.
It was a challenge getting to focus on that strand because it was slightly windy and there is no autofocus with the D60 with the 50mm (I really need to find a job soon so I can upgrade to the D90 haha). I had to step back and include a bigger part of the scene to get the whole strand in focus while keeping the rest relatively blurry. I made it home with 25 minutes to spare, did a quick edit and submitted a rather uninspired entry to the bovine challenge haha…
Post-Processing My main objective for post processing was to emphasize that golden glow, which was what drew me to the scene in the first place.
-I did a square crop which I am really fond of.
-I duplicated the layer and blended in ~75% soft light (a staple for me in almost all advanced editing challenges). I think this is a better alternative to increasing the saturation than through H/S/L because it intensifies the color without having the “oversaturated” look.
-I manually blurred three strands to the left because they were not completely blurry.
-Resized to 700x700
-Unsharp Mask x2 (High and low radius)
-Warming filter and low opacity Nik Color efex glamour glow to make the tones more golden
-At this point I realized that I had a slight lens flare on the bottom so did some healing brush/cloning.
-Added border. I first used black but I felt like the white accentuates the colors more.
-Curves layer to make it brighter
-I did noise reduction on the upper portion of the image
-Final pass of USM
Statistics
Place: 15 out of 341 Avg (all users): 6.5950 Avg (commenters): 8.6364 Avg (participants): 6.6154 Avg (non-participants): 6.5333 Views since voting: 2836 Views during voting: 230 Votes: 121 Comments: 23 Favorites: 17 (view)
it was a tough tough choice, but you did such a great job with your narrative, I must award you the coveted Purple Prose Award for best narrative in the June 2010 Free Study. Congratulations!
Great job... my favorite of the challenge. Thanks for your PS outline too! When you say blended in 75% soft light, did you do anything besides duplicating the layer and setting it to soft layer and 75%? Aynway, nice job!
You got an 8 from me on this one. I almost commented during the challenge, and if I had, I would have said: "magic hour indeed." Nothing like those late-day rays for golden tones.
Mission Peak is awesome, by the way. Running downhill is killer!
Comment from an amateur, non-voting, non-member. Take it for what it's worth...
Just doing a quick scroll through the 300+ images in this submission. This one stopped the click-through for me and had me stop to stare. I love the quality of the light you've captured and the effectiveness of the square aspect ratio!
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