It’s been close to a month since my visit to the Salton Sea. Since then I’ve gone to Portland, and the Columbia Gorge. It seemed like things kept getting in the way of publishing the two galleries. Now in one weekend I’m publishing both Galleries.
I think you’ll see that the delay in the Salton Sea Gallery wasn’t because the place had no photo possibilities. In fact, I found it to be an amazing place, and I can’t wait to go back.
I worked this shot for hours in the computer. Started out doing an HDR. I wasn’t quite happy with the results. Seemed to introduce too much noise in the photo. I tried using Dfine and DxO to remove the noise and it was still there. I thought that if a sharpened everything but the noise it would make it less visible. Finally gave up and just took the dark & light raw files into Photoshop as layers. Added a mask & used the gradient tool to show some of each layer. Oh, I did use Viveza 2 to brighten the tower.
By the way, that wasn’t my favorite pano from that shoot. Here it is:
I had assumed that there wouldn’t be much difference in the Merge to Panorama options in Photoshop. But reading a recent Rick Sammon post I realized that it might make a big difference. On this Pano I took on “auto” a lot of the foreground was cut off. I redid the pano using “cylindrical” and a lot more foreground was saved.
Another desert shot that I’m fond of.
