Grand Canyon

Art Morgan

Since the weather forecast called for a chance of precipitation, I ventured up to the Grand Canyon a couple weekends ago. We got a bit of snow Sunday night/Monday morning, along with 30+ MPH winds Monday. With the wind chill factor, it was a bit cold for this desert rat. :uhoh C&C welcome.

#1



#2



#3



#4





Thanks for lookin'!

anwmn1

Art- looks like a great but cold trip to the canyon.

Of these I think #1 is the standout image followed by #4.

The foreground is great in the first and you have good depth and detail throughout the image. I really like the tree on the left side and while the tree on the right isn't visually dynamic it does help in framing the shot.

The focus in #2 and #3 seems a bit soft and they just lack the same dynamics as the other two.

The canyon is always a crap shoot though. How cold was it?

Art Morgan

Aaron, thanks for the comments. It is really appreciated. And I agree with all that you said.

According to the vehicle's thermometer which seems to be reasonably accurate, it was 28 -31 Monday morning as I was driving around. But the wind...oh man! As I was driving along Desert View drive, at about 30 MPH, a cloud shadow on the ground passed me as if I was standing still. I don't think I've ever seen clouds moving that fast.

Allan FG

They all look great, and cold

byoshi

I like them all, great comp.

Crokey

Looks like you had a great trip. Some day I hope to visit this amazing landscape myself. It might just be me, but every photo except the third one looks a little dull and might need a tiny tweek with the exposure values in lightroom, but it is only my opinion. I quite like that third photo, the dappled light and undulating landscape feel like a texture, like I could reach out and run my hand over it.

zoomer

3 is from a great vantage point, really shows the size and beauty of the canyon. This monitor sucks so can't speak to the technical perfection of it.

Art Morgan

Allan, byoshi, Crokey, zoomer-- Thanks for the comments!

Crokey- I agree they do look a bit dull, more so when I look at them on other monitors away from my desktop's Dell ultrasharp.

It is frequently hazy in the Canyon- sure was this time- and the distances across are much greater than it would appear in a photo, so there's more room for haze to dull the images. That said, I know there's much more I have to learn about PP and in the future I hope to do a better job on making them look their best.

Crokey

A simple enough way to pop photos is to crank up the midtone contrast, which is usually what haze kills. Can't remember where I picked this trick up, but give it a try:
1.Merge all the layers into a new layer(Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E is a shortcut), or if you only have the background layer and no others, just duplicate that.
2.Then go into Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask
3.Usually for landscapes you set a really small Radius like .8 and quite a large amount like 50percent or so, this time however set the amount to something like 10percent and the radius high, I mean really high, like 60-80pixels. Leave the Threshold alone. This will probably be to strong for your liking, but then you can use the opacity on the layers to act like a Volume Control, or put an empty mask and brush it in as you like. I find this especially good at kicking haze's ass.

Art Morgan

Thanks, Crokey! I played with the settings and ended up using radius of 70 and 50%. I masked the sky 100% and the foreground 50%. What an improvement IMO. What do you think?

#2 un-hazed




#4 un-hazed

Crokey

Well, I might be prejudiced, but I think they look better! In the first one, those distant lit cliffs might have a tad too much contrast. Atmospheric haze is a great way to create depth in a photo, so you don't want to remove it entirely from distant objects, just try lessening it gradually as you move from the closer objects to the distant ones. These look fine, but if your using that method in the future, sometimes it changes the color a little bit, in which case change, if it looks bad, just the blending mode to Luminosity and it won't touch the color.

Art Morgan

Thanks again for the tips!