Michael Weatherford
About the Image(s)
Narrative: I took this panoramic photo in Arches National Park, Utah on October 11, 2016 around 5:00PM. Pentax K-1; Rokinon 14mm lens; f16; 1/20; ISO200. Nancy and I were part of a Road Scholar photography group, and I was shooting one of the iconic features of the park. I turned around and was awe-struck by this dramatic cloud formation. I decided to shoot a panorama consisting of four images, each created using “pixel shift” technology. The final photo is actually a combination of 16 images “ here’s why. Pixel shifting works by combining four images of each scene, shifting the camera sensor one pixel for each image so that complete data on all adjacent pixels in the scene are recorded. The four images are combined in post processing to produce a super sharp final image. It’s hard to explain, so read about it here if you are interested: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/photography/tips-and-solutions/pixel-shift-shootout-olympus-vs-pentax-vs-sony-vs-panasonic
Anyway, I merged the four pixel-shift images in Lightroom to produce the panorama. To bring out the drama of the clouds (and to indulge my fantasy of being Ansel Adams) I converted the original color image to black and white. I cropped the image about 10% and used the adjustment brush to lighten or darken as needed. Sliders were used to adjust highlights, shadows, set a very low black point, and add a lot of contrast. I also applied a pretty high degree of sharpening using sliders in the “Detail” section of Lightroom. The image was then finished off in Topaz Studio. I have included a color version of the image as the “original” Which do you like best?
This round’s discussion is now closed!
11 comments posted
This one is worth hanging. As a side note, if you were to enter this in a competition I noticed that the hot spots in the clouds do not show up in the color version. Maybe you could make some adjustment in that area.
I think that this is your best image thus far----you should be quite proud of this effort.   Posted: 03/05/2019 15:23:14
(Groups 4 & 15 & 58 & 59 & 72)