articles/Landscape/lightinthelangdale-page3

Light in the Langdales - part 3 of 1 2 3 4 5 6

by Paul Gallagher Published 01/04/2009

When the preliminary work is done and you are sitting in front of your monitor, it is time to consider how you are going to reproduce what you saw as tones of grey - to revisit the moment again. At this time I often stare at the cleaned scan and try to picture what I saw and felt when I was there. I then begin to decide what working 'zones' I need in the image and how to bring about this change. For this photograph of the Langdale Valley I broke the raw image down into four working zones: the sky, the shadowed hill flanks on the left of the frame, the sunlit Langdale Pikes and finally the sunlit valley floor.

It is important to say at this stage that Photoshop is an amazing piece of software that can perform any single task in 10 different ways! It is also vital to concentrate on the image you are working on, as opposed to trying to be too smart and make the changes in the most complicated way possible. Simplicity is the way! As I often say, when I worked in darkrooms all fine adjustments were made using either circles of card glued to the end of a length of wire or pieces of card with holes cut out of them. After all, if it was good enough for Ansel Adams it is certainly good enough for me.

The tools I use are the lasso tool, set to different feather settings for varying selections, and curves. Each and every curve is applied using an adjustment layer so as not to degrade to original scan file. For this image, the first selection I made was of the upper part of the image including the shadowed flanks of Oak Howe. I applied a curve to this entire area to darken both the sky and sunlit mountain but most importantly return the depth of shadow to Oak Howe. This single selection performed a number of tasks and it is worth bearing in mind that more than one working 'zone' can be tackled at once as opposed to making many fiddly selections, running the risk of your finished image looking like a patchwork quilt.

The second selection was of the valley floor. I used a large feather on this selection as the sunlight did not actually illuminate the tops of the trees and there is a gentle transition into shadow as the valley narrows in the middle of the image. Once again the curve was made with an adjustment layer and I pulled the bottom portion of the curve line to reintroduce the sunlight into the bottom of the image. After this I then 'pegged' back the darker portion of the curve line so as not to weaken the shadows.

• Light in the Langdales page 1
  
• Light in the Langdales page 2
  
• Light in the Langdales page 3
  
• Light in the Langdales page 4
  
• Light in the Langdales page 5
  
• Light in the Langdales page 6
  

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