Before and After – Sunlight at Hopetoun Falls

This is an entry for my [ilink url=”http://www.alexwisephotography.net/blog/category/technique/before-and-after-technique/” style=”note”]Before and After series of photographs[/ilink] where I share how I captured and post processed an image. This particular image is from Hopetoun Falls looking back down river of the water that runs off from the main fall. Hopetoun Falls forms part of the Otways Ranges and is a beautiful part of the world. If you’d like to see more photos from this trip be sure to check out my [ilink url=”http://www.alexwisephotography.net/blog/2013/12/08/weekend-trip-down-the-great-ocean-road/” style=”note”]post from the Great Ocean Road[/ilink] which includes this among many.

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Capturing and Editing Sunlight at Hopetoun Falls

This is one of those photographs that as a photographer, we view it through our eyes and then when we try to capture it in camera it’s incredibly difficult to replicate what our eye is seeing. On this particular day we had shot the waterfall most of the day under overcast conditions (perfect for photographing waterfalls). Later during our time at Hopetoun Falls, the cloud started to clear and the sun began to shine stunningly through the trees. Rather than pack up my gear like I normally would when the sun starts shining harshly at a waterfall I wanted to try pull off a shot of the sun bursting through the trees.

Taking the Photo

Framing the photo straight away I knew if I wanted to get both the stream and sun bursting through the trees in shot I would have to take two photos and stitch them together. Even though I was shooting with a Canon 17-40 it still wasn’t wide enough to fit in the one shot so a two image stitch would be the go. Shooting the images I’m using my Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 17-40, Hoya Circular Polariser and Manfrotto tripod.

I also knew that trying to capture the dynamic range properly in one shot for each stitch was going to be very difficult. Not one to normally use the auto bracketing exposure (AEB) feature on my camera, I opted to take 3 exposures of the top half of the stitch and another 3 for the bottom part of the stitch which resulted in a slight mess of images in my Lightroom catalogue.

In case you’re not familiar with the AEB feature I wrote [ilink url=”http://www.alexwisephotography.net/blog/2013/01/12/automatic-exposure-bracketing-aeb-explained/”]article about Auto Exposure Bracketing[/ilink] a while ago now which explains the feature a little more. I took the multiple exposures as it provided me with some insurance that if I didn’t get it right with the neutral exposure I would also have the under and over exposed images to play with.

Combining and Editing the Photos

When it comes to exposure blending my level of competency is around average so the idea of combining this with a two image stitch was a recipe for disaster. I processed the images from the trip and let the images for this one sit for a while. Normally when I shoot, I like to process my images within 24 hours of taking them. I hate the feeling of sitting on unedited images and like to get them processed, not necessarily to post online but just to have them processed according to how I remembered the scene. For this one, I was actually too intimidated by the prospect ahead and knew I was in for some fun in Photoshop.

It wasn’t until a weekend a few weeks later that I finally decided to give combining and editing the images a crack.

Combining The Photos

Having used auto exposure bracketing to capture an under, neutral and over exposed image for both the top and bottom parts of the frame, I went about creating two image stitches for each bracket.

By this I mean, I created a two image stitch of the two over exposed images, again for the neutrally exposed images and another for the under exposed images. This resulted in 3 separate stitched images consisting of 1 over exposed stitch, 1 neutral exposed stitch and 1 under exposed stitch.

When stitching images, most people tend to recommend various different pieces of software like PTGui but I’ve had quite good luck with the Photoshop stitch tool. This can be found under File > Automate > Photomerge.

Editing the Photos

[box type=”info”]Haven’t blended images in Photoshop before? Read my Photoshop image blending tutorial to get started[/box]

Now that I had these 3 separate image stitches of each exposure, I went about opening the neutral image in Photoshop and layering the over and under exposed images as layers on top. The over exposed image would be used to bring out the dynamic range in the foliage surrounding the waterfall and the waterfall itself while the under exposed layer would be used to capture the sun bursting through the trees. Luckily, it wasn’t as hard as I originally thought but just required a lot of low opacity layer masking to subtly bring out areas of a layer. The hardest part was blending the sun into the shot which required me to use a combination of the brush tool and gradient masks to ever subtly drop it back in without it looking uneven to the rest of the scene.

I’ve attached a screenshot to the right which highlights the different parts of the image where layer masks from the 3 images were used. Call me lazy but I’ve become a fan of the [ilink url=”http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-photoshop-cc/using-contentaware-fill-to-remove-distractions/”]Adobe Photoshop Content Aware Tool[/ilink]  which for the most part works perfectly. Generally if this doesn’t work I’ll revert back to the [ilink url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY023ZQJy0M”]Adobe Clone Stamp Tool[/ilink] to remove unwanted distractions like the branch in the corner and lens flare at the bottom of the stream.

Once all the images were blended in, I then went about making selective adjustments to the saturation and individual colour channels to colour grade parts of the image. I’m fond of using layer masks for saturation changes as it allows you to increase or decrease the saturation or change the hue of a particular area in the image without affecting the overall photo.  For this image, I used selective saturation and hue adjustments to both the water and foliage areas.

Finally some cropping was applied to the image and a warming filter was applied to add some warmth to the sunburst coming through the trees. With this I used a layer mask to ensure changes with the warming filter were only limited to the sunburst and not the rest of the image.

And that’s that. Something I learnt from this photo was that sometimes it’s okay to sit on an image and procrastinate about it rather than process it immediately. Sometimes I should probably do a bit more often.

Thanks for reading and I hope this was helpful,

– Alex