Fliter suggestions, critical evaluation needed as well

godogs57

Senior Member
Headed to Highlands, NC in a couple of weeks and am looking for some suggestions regarding filters for landscape shots. I will taking the usual mountain shots, with all the haze and waterfall shots. Up there in June, it does not take long for the haze to mess things up. Waterfalls.....would a filter assist me to any degree in the shaded conditions I encounter? I recently purchased polarizing filters now for all my lenses, perhaps that will help.

Below are three shots that represent what I will be encountering up that way.

Any and all suggestions are sincerely appreciated.

Haze was killing me here!
OffWhitesideMountain.jpg


Never was satisfied with the colors, water looked blue rather than "white", etc:
Highlandswaterfall.jpg



A decent shot here:
CullesajaFalls.jpg
 

Hoss

Moderator
In the first shot, I believe that the dynamic range of the camera is coming into play as much as the haze. You have some pretty dark areas as well as others that are very bright. Filters won't fix that. You are hitting some of that in the second shot also. The blue would show up with a faster shutter speed, but you'd loose the areas in shadows. What you are seeing is overexposure of the water and clouds. If you get the exposure set to where they look right, then the areas in shadows are going to be dark. There are post processing techniques that can be used to extend the dynamic range such as HDR and others.

Hoss
 

rip18

Senior Member
Nice shots.

Polarizing filters can help with the water shots, and to some degree to bring some blue back into the sky.

A graduated neutral density filter may be of some help with landscape shots where the sky has a relatively straight horizon line. Of course using two (or more) images (one or more exposed for the land, and one exposed for the sky) and then manually combining them or combining them through an HDR procedure would work as well.

Enjoy your trip to Highlands.
 

Hoss

Moderator
Rip has some great suggestions for on the camera. Since I don't have a graduated neutral density filter, I never seem to think of that.
With godogs57's premission, I have done some post processing work on the first one using PSE 7. Here's the result. The steps I used were
1) open image and adjust levels to get the clouds to show up using the levels adjustment in the enhance menu. Note, the forground was completely lost, but don't worry, we'll get it back.
2) Select the place commend from the File menu and select the same photo (I'd saved it to my desktop) and select the OK check box. This layer can then be adjusted if necessary to bring up the highlights in the forground using the levels in the enhance menu.
3) Select the original layer and then add a levels layer between the two layers.
4) Select the placed layer and group it to the levels layer using the the group with previous command in the layers menu.
5) Select the gradiant tool and select the black and white gradient. The gradiant tool should be set to reverse, dither, transparency checked.
6) Place the cursur at the bottom of the photo and drag a line to the top.
This will result in a the photo having a greater dynamic range than the original.
For the one I posted, I also ran a noise reduction to clean up the clouds. Expanding the range of the highlight area results in more noise, so doing this helped to clean it up.

If you try this, just remember the undo button is your friend, I backed up several times because I didn't like where the final image was headed.

Hoss
 

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  • OffWhitesideMountain.jpg
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LOVEMYLABXS

Senior Member
WOW that's something else Hoss nice job :cool:


Godogs those are some nice shots :fine:
 

godogs57

Senior Member
All I have is PSE 5.....most of what you were saying was French to me....I suppose I need some serious tutoring on PSE.

Great job on the photo by the way!
 

wvdawg

Moderator
Staff member
Nice processing Hoss - those clouds pop - great photos godog57!
I got a lot to learn about PSE!
 

Hoss

Moderator
I'm not sure if 5 has all the things you need. The main one would be the "Place" command. It is located in the File drop down menu. What it does is put a copy of the same photo in a new layer on top of the original. I'll try to put together a better tutorial with screen shots.

Hoss
 

Hoss

Moderator
Here's the tutorial with screen shots. I made it a series of PDF's (1 large one was bigger than I could post). The series are numbered with the steps, so just open them in order and have fun. This was done in PSE 7, but if it will work in earlier versions, the commands likely are in the same areas.


Hoss
 

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  • Steps 1-3.pdf
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  • Steps 4-6.pdf
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  • Steps 7-9.pdf
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  • Final Step 10.pdf
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Browtine

Senior Member
I played in PS with shot #1 as well. Since I didn't ask permission I didn't post my version (See Hoss, I listen sometimes... :D ) but there's a lot of potential in that shot with proper editing, especially if you start with the original high res file with more bit depth info to work with.

I did however want to share a quick "haze reducer" trick I learned a few years ago for any program with "Unsharp Mask", which should be included in ANY version of Adobe PS(E). I prefer to do it as an adjustment layer but it can be done directly to the image.

You have to play with the settings for each image to get it like you want it, but open the Unsharp Mask filter and set the amount low (somewhere between 15 to 30 is usually about right but some can require more or less) and set the radius to anything from 50 to 100+ depending on the size/resolution of the image you're working on. Working on web sized files such as the ones posted here I usually start at around 40 and work it up to sometimes 60 or more to get what I want. I rarely ever use threshold in Unsharp Mask but you can slide the slider for it around and see if it makes any improvements to your particular image.

To do it as a separate layer just make a copy of the image to a second layer ( Control + J should do it on a windows machine I think.) and change the Blend Mode to Luminosity, then do this.

I'm including a screen grab of the Unsharp Mask filter settings to illustrate a basic starting point for this technique. Basically this technique adjusts "local contrast" using the sharpening algorithms of Unsharp Mask. It can be quite effective on light to slightly moderate haze in shots like #1. I had to go further than that for this shot, but this technique did make a noticeable difference in it with no other changes. It's worth a shot before resorting to more complicated methods.

The screen grab showing starting point settings for this technique... Hoss will remember this shot as well. I scared him with the title I posted with it a long time ago. :D
 

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rip18

Senior Member
All kinds of good suggestions coming out of this one!
 
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