About the Image(s)

I had the opportunity to photograph the fall colors in Colorado. Here’s one of the images that I took on this trip.

This was taken in September and is a HDR pano that consisted of 5 vertical images to get this field of view. Taken at 1/100th, 1/30th, and 1/10th of a second at f8, ISO 500 at 62mm on my Nikon Z8 with the 24-120mm lens.

I first merged all 15 images with HDR Panorama merge in Lightroom, then started all the processing. I made my standard global adjustments for the luminosity for highlights, shadows, white and black, denoised the image a bit, increased vibrance and decreased saturation, then I started on the masks, this is where the fun started! There’s a total of 14 masks and I can’t write them all but the goal was to bring the viewers eyes to the beautiful color or the trees and how the sun was hitting it from the side, as well as how the sunset was lighting up Chimney Rock. I also did a small radial on the moon to bring back the detail in it.

I then brought it over to PS and where I added a two levels layers to further adjust the luminosity and bring the viewers eyes to the trees and then darkened the shadows a tiny bit where the sun wasn’t hitting the rock and green trees. I also duplicated my original image as a smart object and adjusted the color of the front row of yellow trees to make them a bit more vibrant and masked everything else out with a layer mask. Finally, I put a small vignette on the image to darken the bottom left and top right of the image.