Sierras Early Light (View Larger)

This is a very striking image! I'm intrigued with the rock and clouds making my eyes draw to the left. The formation of clouds give this image such a feeling of movement and the light haze caressing the mountains, in the background, are an extra treat and are very pleasing to view.

 

A great capture with wonderful details. Love it!

 

deb

Thank you very much for those encouraging words.

This is really really good. Beautiful post and the toning is fantastic. 3 wooos and and an attaboy Amigo. ..Ray ps clouds are pretty cool also

The tone rendering very beautifull: subtle and very balanced

Chris Harris and I arrived at Alabama Hills in July 2008 just before

dawn. The fires added to the summer haze and we doubted that we would

get any photographs which would include the sky but just before

sunrise the skies began to clear. Alabama Hills is located near Lone

Pine, CA and was once a location for many a western movie. The

landscape is filled with granite boulders both as lone monoliths and

groups. Just before the sun rose these beautiful clouds appeared and

even though there was haze I knew I could diminish the effect in

Photoshop. I first work on the image in color even though I knew it

was going to be a B&W. The reason being the RAW image is always flat

and by boosting both the color and contrast you can control the B&W to

a higher degree. I even boosted some colors to where the looked

exaggerated in the color version but I knew would increase their

separation once converted to B&W. I used five curve layers to adjust

the contrast in different areas. The first was an overall curve layer

to adjust the overall contrast. The second was masked to only include

the sky. The third and fourth were for the distant mountains. The

first was a contrast boost to help show some separation in the

mountains which were pretty much one tonal value. The second was to

increase the contrast even more and was just the previous layer

duplicated . I then changed it's blending mode to Softlight which adds

even more contrast but this was too much but that was corrected by

simply reducing the layer's opacity. The last curve layer was masked

to just deal with the foreground boulders and grasses.For my burn and

dodge layer I merged visible layers without flattening the image (

Crtl+Alt+Shift+E) and used this layer with the Dodge & Burn tools to

lighten the brighten grasses and highlight areas on the large boulder.

The dodge tool was used the same way. The final touch was a gradient

at the top to pull the eye more into the image and finally an Ektalure

Cream toning. I will include the original RAW for comparison. The

image doesn't look like first light but to cut the haze it was

necessary to increase the contrast to this level. Now that isn't to

say that I couldn't have maintained more of the haze look but that's

another image.

The original color RAW.

Quite remarkable transformation.

Thanks Amigo I do appreciate your encouraging words.

Thanks Jef!

You did some very fine work on this image, pulled every last detail from all the layers and transformed it into an outstanding image! You must have worked quite a while on this but the results are proof of your success. I really enjoyed the tutorial as well.

Thanks Kim and I'm glad you enjoyed the turtorial.

Great image Leo. A lot of effort went into this from you explanation. You really did a great job on the conversion. Looking at the RAW file and at the converted image, it becomes very clear that there are some images that should be shown in B&W only. Did you take this image with the intention to convert to B&W? Thanks for posting and sharing.

I am basically a B&W photographer who spend many years carrying a 4x5 field camera for my photography, so yes almost every image is seen in B&W. Thanks for taking the time to comment, Douglas.

As the color-only shooter, I would not even press the button in a haze like this. :-)

 

I'm glad you did because the result is spectacular. Be it dramatic composition first, followed by BW conversion and beautiful sky. But what I like the most is the dreamy feel of the mountains in the backgroud. Excellent job and also thanks for sharing the directions! Cheers, Marek

I like your B&W conversion overall, but your processing has created some unusual and unnatural effects on the distant peaks. Looking at your original confirmed my thoughts. Also, the halo effect on the sky just above the peaks is quite noticeable. A little re-work on that area, and I think you have a good image...

 

Anish

I not only applaud your photo but also your comments that go with it. They give a valauble insight into how you came to this. Motivation for me

Well done

I thank all of you you taking the time to view this image and leave a comment. I do appreciate hearing from all of you.

This is a remarkable image. The cloud formation gives such a feeling of movement. The tones in this photo are beautiful as well. Thank you for writing all the details of how you accomplished these beautiful effects. You give inspiration to someone who hasn't done much with B&W conversions.

 

Debra

Thank you so much for your encouraging words.