Sometimes you take photos and get excited what you captured, but then you return home and instantly get disappointed once you look at them on your (calibrated) screen.

One of those moments I had just recently upon returning from a 4WD trip through the Outback of Australia.
We went up north to Northern Queensland to shoot the rainforest.
I waited for the sun to shine through a whole in the canopy of the rainforest and was rewarded with some really nice sun rays (caused by the 100% humidity up there).

However back home these rays were almost invisible when looking at my raw files in Lightroom.

In those instances I need to recreate what I saw. This is when photoshop is really handy.
Some call it cheating – I call it recreating what you saw – or what you felt.
The camera with it’s 5-6 stops of dynamic range is a pretty primitive tool compared to the capabilities of your eyes which have a dynamic range of about 25 stops.

So I have no problem to utilize photoshop in those cases. Maybe eventually photoshop will become obsolete for me, however as long as we deal with cameras which have very little dynamic range, it is a necessary tool for me.

The below photo has been run through photoshop using the following steps:


• copy background layer
• Filter > Blur > Radial Blur
• Amount: 100, Select Zoom, Select Best
• Move centre point into the appropriate place where the gap in the canopy is
• Recreate the same effect one more time by pressing CMD/CTRL + F
• Set Layer Blending mode to Screen
• Create Layer Mask and take out the effect where you think it is overdone


I am quite happy with the end result and it reflects very closely what I saw when I was in this special place far away from civilization.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 9:25 pm and is filed under Geek Talk, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.