First sunrise with my 20D

devbobo

On the weekend, I was down in Portland, Victoria and got a chance to get up early to shoot the sunrise.

This was the first with my 20D, and I was experimenting with my new B+W 10 stop ND filter. I realise I blow the sun a little bit, but it's all a learning process I guess.

One question I had, when I printed this shot, I got a fair amount of banding in the sun/sky, is there anyway to reduce this in PS ?

Any suggestions/comments most welcome.

Cheers,

David

rahmonster

Hi David.

Wow I really like this one! I don't even care the sun is blown personally. I love the framing, the compostioin the warmth of the colour, the mist. I think it has such a great mood to it. I can't help with the banding unfortunately, but I hope someone else can because this would look great on a wall

SteveF

Hello,

Except for the sun this is a really nice shot.

Banding might be sensor "overload" (not sure of exactly the right term for this - it seems to be concentric circles around the blown out sun.

If you shot this raw you might try blending to different exposures, one with the EC turned way down to make the sun a littl emore manageable.

Other issue is dust - I can see quite a few spots in the upper left hand corner - probably others lurking around.

Also might be that it you processed this as an 8 bit jpeg the banding appeared as the lower color resolution couldn't handle the subtle gradations in the sky. 16 bit might do better.

At any rate it would be helpful to know exactly how the file was processed to figure of the banding.

One other comment would be a little rotation - seems your horizon is tilted a tad to the left.

pathfinder

Very nice sunrise. Auspiscious begining with your20D!!

You might select the sky and add just a bit of noise with Filter>Noise>Add Noise on a second Layer.

eg: Hit ctrl-J to create a second layer, select the sky how ever you desire, and then add the noise and blend the two images. That should help get rid of the banding. Might try blending in Color rather than Normal also.

Impossible colors in LAB can help - it is very hard to have any color in RGB when the image is very,very bright since the brightest point in RGB IS 255,255,255. Where as in LAB the brightness and the color are in competely seperate channels. Thus you can have a very, very, very bright orange that is NOT white in LAB. If is done on a second layer it can be blended with the original image to replace some of the lost color around the sun and the sky.

So you might also go to LAB and steepen the A and B curves and create a nice curve for the L channel as well and then blend that layer with the original layer beneath.

devbobo

rahmonster wrote:

Hi David.

Wow I really like this one! I don't even care the sun is blown personally. I love the framing, the compostioin the warmth of the colour, the mist. I think it has such a great mood to it. I can't help with the banding unfortunately, but I hope someone else can because this would look great on a wall

Thanks Rahmonster.

I am really happy how it came out....i printed out an A4 copy, framed and mounted on the wall...looks great.

David

gus

pathfinder wrote:

Very nice sunrise. Auspiscious begining with your20D!!

You might select the sky and add just a bit of noise with Filter>Noise>Add Noise on a second Layer.

eg: Hit ctrl-J to create a second layer, select the sky how ever you desire, and then add the noise and blend the two images. That should help get rid of the banding. Might try blending in Color rather than Normal also.

Impossible colors in LAB can help - it is very hard to have any color in RGB when the image is very,very bright since the brightest point in RGB IS 255,255,255. Where as in LAB the brightness and the color are in competely seperate channels. Thus you can have a very, very, very bright orange that is NOT white in LAB. If is done on a second layer it can be blended with the original image to replace some of the lost color around the sun and the sky.

So you might also go to LAB and steepen the A and B curves and create a nice curve for the L channel as well and then blend that layer with the original layer beneath.

PF..how do you select out the sky ? With the lasso tool ?


Cool shot btw david...very novacastrian i must say....is it ?

devbobo

Steve and PF,

Thanks for your great comments and in-depth detail. I spent a fair bit of the afternoon playing around with postprocessing, trying LAB and other stuff.

I have decided to chalk this one up to experience and perhaps get a grad ND filter for next time.

Cheers,

David

devbobo

Humungus wrote:

Cool shot btw david...very novacastrian i must say....is it ?

Hey Gus,

No mate, it's from Portland not Newcastle.

David