How to Make Mountains

I shot just after the sun went down today, which gave beautiful colors, but horribly flat light. It was especially hazy and cloudy over the went horizon, and so the mountains off in the distance were flat as a burnt pancake run over by a steamroller driven by a elephant that has eaten nothing but Big Macs and hasn't worked out in years.

Here's what it looked like:

It's pretty, but not that interesting in my opinion. The purple touch is really nice, but there's no black, and there's no white! So sad, that needed to change.

First, in Lr I put the contrast, shadows, and clarity sliders all the way up...yes, I did that. :O Then I put the highlights all the way down, the whites up a lot, and the blacks down quite a bit. Basically, I pulled as much contrast out of this as I possibly could. Quite scary really, what I did. Degrading the image quality probably quite a lot with all the edits and adjustments. But some times that's okay.

With the contrast fixed, there was still something not quite right. I think that I needed some selective focus, so into Ps I went. There's some tilt-shift filters in Ps (that don't actually do what tilt's or shift actually do), but they do a nice little job at blurring things. I feathered the blur transitions quite a bit, so that the transition from in focus to out of focus was very gradual, and not that distracting to the viewer.

But that's a bit cliche now, with all the iPhone photography, so I added and iris blur too. Why they called it that I don't really know, but it's just a circular blur.

Note: people at Adobe really do know what they're doing as far as what actual tilt's and shifts and all those camera movements do, it's just not possible to do it digitally...yet. Blurring parts of the image just look similar enough to most people, and its a useful tool.

Anyway, I combined the two blur's with some layer masks. I put the mountain in the background in focus, as well last the hill in the middle, and the rest of the frame just sort of fell out of focus with out you really noticing. The focus is not supposed to be the main focus of the photo, it's just an element that helps you as the view look at what I want you to look at. It's a tool for manipulating you, making you look at what I want you to look at. making you think what I want you to think. Give me money..

So here's the layer mask I used on the tilt shift blur. The iris blur was very slight, and just around the out side edges of the frame.

See you tomorrow!