Creating a convincing landscape composite

by rickrphoto

As photographers, we have a vision.

I have now visited Horseshoe bend in Page, Arizona 3 times. Once a year since 2012. The first two visits I went, the ‘perfect shot’ eluded me.

We have the perfect idea of what the lighting could be like, the clouds in the sky, the colors, and the composition. In studio, one can create their vision with controlled lighting equipment, hair, makeup, and models. On location, the factors of nature take into play.

It was time to try something different for a now familiar location. As an artist, it helps to research the location and see the work that others have created at it. A consistent pattern was shots at sunset, with a washed out sky, or a dark foreground. let’s not even start with the countless HDR images of the location.

What really stood out to me was the lack of shots at night. The few I found were not done amazingly well by my standards, so I decided to make it my goal to create a compelling night landscape image of a heavily photographed location. There are a few ways to attempt such a feat: going out there at night, and hoping there is enough moonlight to capture detail in the features (which was unlikely given the geographic features of the bend with its 1000+ foot vertical drop) or to ‘fake it’ in photoshop.

To successfully fake a night image in photoshop, a few things had to be taken into consideration. The angles and direction of the light, the color pallet, and the exposure. For this I waited until after the sun had ducked down over the horizon, and underexposed the shot. This gave a darker image that was flat. I used a Canon EF 17 f4 TS-E to get a proper perspective of the landscape.

Flat raw of Horseshoe Bend

Not that compelling of a shot. It’s dark, there’s no detail in the sky, and there is not much going on. I braved the edge of the cliff with my camera setup to get as little of the cliff wall on my side in the frame. I took several images and this happened to be the one that I chose for the final photo.

I started by importing the images into Capture One Pro 7 (Phase One’s amazing raw software) which played a significant roll in my final image. In there I made some minor exposure, contrast, highlight/shadow/ and levels adjustments. The most important was removing the generic 5d Mark II color profile, and using ‘Phase One – No Color Correction’ with a linear response blending mode. This gave me the above image which is relatively flat, but with incredible dynamic range. I exported it as a 16 bit .Tiff.

I made the decision to capture all of the water, and given the massive scale of it, was barely able to fit it in the 17mm full frame DSLR frame. I had a little space on the horizon, but not nearly enough as I would have liked. A square frame suited it well, so it was extended in photoshop to be a square image.

A good start compositionally, but that sky really is lacking with all that negative space. Earlier this year I was in Death Valley National Park, by the Eureka Sand Dunes. It was extremely clear and I managed to capture a number of clean night sky images of stars. I typically have several skies on hand, as sometimes you get a beautiful scene with a dull sky, and changing that can make a much more impactful image. Careful masking will make a seamless image. The next photo is with the sky added and masked accordingly. Still, it doesn’t look right.

Careful dodging and burning can help to make the transition more seamless, a detail that should be very carefully and tastefully done to achieve a convincing end result. This next image has undergone dodging and burning, as well as some general cleanup with the clone stamp tool. I reflected the sky in the water, used a different blending mode, and masked in some of the stars to make them ‘reflect’ the stars from the night sky and add another realistic detail to the image.

More seamless, but not exactly ‘Wow’. The color is the most important part to come.

Earlier, when using Capture One, we made the image flat by removing the camera color correction profile, and using a linear response mode. This was done on both the RAW image of the stars and foreground that was blended together for this shot. Doing this gave us a file that has significantly more potential with color work. When used with a combination of Curves, levels, hue/sat, selective color, brightness/contrast with appropriate layer masking it was able to convincingly blend the colors of the scene together. Stylistically the overall image was given a very ‘cool’ look to appear as if it was shot late at night and lit by the moon. With the right amount of adjustments the image was able to pop off the screen and and capture my vision and goal.

The end result of this process?

Needless to say, I feel that the 3rd time’s a charm.

Larger view on 500px.com: http://500px.com/photo/67256105

If you would like to try a similar color editing technique, I suggest going and downloading a trial of Capture One Pro 7 to play around with it yourself. A single curves layer will do wonders to an image processed in such a way. If you would like to purchase a fully licensed copy of it, there is a 10% coupon code at the bottom of this page.

Capture One Pro 7 can be purchased here from Phase One directly:

http://www.phaseone.com/buy-co7

When checking out the coupon code: AMBROSE will save you 10% ($30)

I hope you enjoyed this first post. Any feedback would be appreciated, and I will try to answer questions. Expect more in the near future.

-Rick