Sailing On The Sun
So this is my third entry for my “Blown Away” project. I picked this one as my final entry because it has a strong overexposure in the Sun's reflection off the water.
The photo was taken on the beach at Santa Monica while I was at one of Trevor Carpenter's photowalks. I took this photo because I liked the simplicity of the small boats on the open water. It also turned out that the harsh reflection of the sun caused a severe overexposure. I wasn't planning on doing much with this one due to the blown out highlights, but it ended up being a good candidate for my project.
The JPEG (1) of this photo was really washed out and lifeless, but the processed RAW file (2) made for a good starting point. Before applying any adjustments, I made a copy of the processed RAW layer and applied a Hard Mix Layer Blend (3) at 30% opacity and 30% fill. Then I touched things up a bit with a Curves Adjustment (4) to give a little more contrast. The last step in my processing was sharpening using the Unsharp Mask (5) at 100%, 4 pixels, and a threshold of 2.
** You can also see this photo on Zooomr and Flickr **
Photo by Brian Auer
08/04/07 Santa Monica, CA
Sailing on the Sun
Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D
Konica Minolta AF DT 18-200
300mm equiv * f/11 * 1/350s * ISO100
Jenni
August 31, 2007Very cool photo, Brian! I love the simplicity of it and the strong colors.
It’s amazing how much it differs from the jpeg you got from your camera. It’s a great example for why one should shoot in RAW if the camera offers it.
Brian Auer
August 31, 2007That’s a good point on the note about RAW photos. The JPEG typically comes out of the camera much less vibrant and contrasty than what you can get from the RAW file. All the additional color and contrast in the RAW file comes from processing — the unprocessed file is actually much worse than the JPEG.
Aamir
December 28, 2008Great idea. As RAW images processed by in a wide-gamut internal colorspace you can get photos like that one.