If Only it Were So Easy To Remove The Smoke
As scary as I felt the High Park Fire was in its first days and its vicinity to town, I cannot even fathom what residents of Colorado Springs and perhaps even Boulder feel like. And while my removal of smoke was in post-processing and unfortunately for our 86+ degree house not in real life I’m proud of my abilities to do so. And, well, sometimes you just have to grab hold of the little things to keep yourself afloat.
I have to say I am thoroughly pleased with my current temp assignment that I’ve been on since March. I love my co-workers. It is awesome to work “in the country” in the city where even meeting people on the road to work results in the country steering wheel wave! While I have occassionally crabby people taking out their frustrations on me for no purpose, I help people. It was no hardship to hear that my stay here was being extended.
After two particularly rough weeks it was a thrill to push the limits of my job description and do a photoshoot for them. They were in need of a high resolution image that could be blown up onto a banner to go in our new museum opening this fall. They borrowed a slighly higher resolution, but more or less the same camera as mine, from the museum and a coworker lined up her grandson and a friend of his to be the models and the five of us headed out to one of the natural areas in the foothills.
You have to love a job that has you hiking for an hour on Monday morning!
Of course when you are on a deadline and have extra people lined up you cannot plan for perfect shooting conditions. Sure enough, Monday morning dawned and things looked pretty promising, then the winds shited and smoke literally rolled into the foothills and into town by 6:30am. We were to shoot at 9am. Driving to the natural area you could hardly see town it was so covered in smoke! It wasn’t nearly as dramatic looking on our way back into town so I didn’t end up taking a picture.
While we tried our best to stick to relatively close backgrounds to keep smoke impact to a minimum, the shot really kind of needed the vista and variety of terrain to have a visual impact. So we shot a ton of both options. Then during down time at work I did some research on reducing haze in post-processing and gave it a shot. I think I suceeded.
What was even better in my mind is that I did all post-processing in Lightroom! I always do rudimentary, all over adjustments in Lightroom before I send the images to Photoshop as Lightroom edits are non-destructive. But I’ve never really gotten much into spot editing. Now, if any of these are chosen for the banner I’ll certainly go do some more detailed work in Photoshop. But I’m quite pleased with my results.
The basic idea was to reduce saturation and luminosity of blues in the image, up localized contrast (via clarity) and in general improve the dynamic range of the image by manipulating the histogram. Because messing with the blues reduced the haze so well I then went back in with localized edits and added blue back into the sky as well as darkened and boosted contrast further in the distant objects. There are a lot of tutorials out there for making these sorts of edits in whatever software you prefer, just Google it or check YouTube.
I can’t wait to hear which image they choose and I’m even more excited to see my photo in large scale out in public! Wowser!
