articles/Landscape/lightinthelangdale-page4

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

by Paul Gallagher Published 01/04/2009

The third selection was of the sunlit mountains. The feather was smaller and I did not worry too much about making it very accurate. It often baffles me when I see people struggling to make an exact selection of a sky in a landscape image before applying adjustments. Even if you manage to do it, it often looks false. In my opinion if this is part of your regular practice you need to reconsider exposure at the camera stage of the proceedings. With this selection I applied a curve which accentuated the sunlight and I once again 'pegged' the upper shadow part of the curve line back, gently increasing contrast, with the main adjustment being in the highlights.

With the fourth curve I revisited the sky. I made a selection of the tops of the clouds on the left side of the image and also included the clouds and the tops of the mountains. This may seem unusual to include the tops of the mountains but I believe that if you gradually 'build' the tonality of the image up; the areas where selections are applied will never be seen. With this curve the emphasis was on the darker end of the curve line and the highlights on this occasion were 'pegged' back to retain the brilliance in the white clouds.

This is the difference between simply burning in and applying tonal control, which is much the same as split grade printing in the darkroom. If the sky was just burned in then the highlights would be darkened excessively and the tonal relationships in the sky and the adjustments would be obvious.

• 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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