Golden Morning

This is another of the photos from my dawn excursion to the local park with my sister.

The version you see above is the final image after post-processing - the remainder of this post shows the original photo out of the camera and brief details of the post-processing that I used to get to the final version.

 

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Here is the original version from the camera (Canon 350D; Sigma 24-70 f2.8 lens; ISO100; f22; 1s; manual exposure and focus modes):

With the post-processing, I was aiming to enhance the warm, glowy feeling - the process was, as always, rather iterative, but the final details were as follows:

1. "Developed" the RAW image in DPP with the following settings:
   • Exposure: +0.5
   • White Balance: Shade (to give it the warm colour cost)
   • Pic style: landscape
   • Saturation: -2
   • Sharpness: 2 (my usual setting)
2. Converted to Jpeg and imported into Photoshop (I have version 7, so can't edit RAW files directly in Photoshop)
3. Created 3 duplicates of the background (giving four in total):
   1. A sharpened layer (just above the background layer) with mode set to luminosity (to avoid those colour fringes that you tend to get when you sharped images like this one)
   2. Above that, a slightly blurred layer with opacity of 50% (normal mode)
   3. Above that, another, more strongly blurred layer with mode set to Soft Light and opacity of 73%.
4. Finally I used a Hue/Saturation layer to slightly adjust the overall hue (Master Hue set to -7) to give a slightly redder overall colour cast - I also used a layer mask to slightly fade off the hue adjustment to some of the greener areas in the lower right area of the image.