I normally don’t mess around with any sort of landscape photography, but it’s a full moon and we’ve had a bunch of cloudless nights, which is unusual for where I am from. So I’m trying to make the most of it. Here’s a shot I took under the full moonlight. I was going for another shot, but it was very foggy when I got to the location. So I decided to make the most of it. Between the blur of the water and the fog, I was going for a very ethereal sort of feeling.
I don’t usually shoot this style, so I welcome any suggestions from people both in PP tips, and camera techniques.
My short term memory is not what it used to be. I read the post a bit hastily and not long into the edit I was convinced it was morning light trying to break through the fog. I guess it’s true that it’t all downhill after 50.
Good 1. I like how you left the fog in on the left side by the mountains. In my edit, it is not so prominent, but I like your fog better. Not sure if it’s because you went B&W or if you use darktable and was able to mask the “dehaze” where I cannot do that in RT.
Maybe if I do edit this up some more, I will turn off dehaze in RT, then put it into the gimp, and use G’Mic’s dehaze + appropriate masking. I think Gmic has a dehaze, though I never used it before.
Edit: I just now saw your “early morning” edit. It didn’t show up the first time I looked. That’s pretty badass how you got the golden-looking light as if it’s sunrise. It doesn’t look quite real, but I like the “early morning” edit also!
Nighttime photography is a reminder that the camera does not see the world the same way that humans do - as far as the camera is concerned, everything is the same colour as it is during the daytime, there’s just less light about. As light levels fall, the cones in the eye become less effective, and vision starts to use a different type of light sensitve cell instead - the rods. You only have one type of rod cell, so in dark conditions you can’t see colour, and there are fewer rods than cones in the central area of your vision (none at all in the fovea) so you see less detail. At intermediate light levels, information from both the cones and the rods is used.
I’ve tried to simulate this by adding a layer with a lightness dependent mask (so the effect is greatest in the shadows and least in the highlights) which:
reduces saturation
adds a blue tint
increases contrast
blurs the image (using a guided filter to preserve edges)
If you turn the ‘night vision’ layer off in Photoflow, the image looks like daytime, which is how the camera ‘sees’ it.
Very cool, Paul, and I like your explanation for how you decided on how to process the picture, and relating it to the way the eye sees.
You’re right, the camera sees things much differently than people do. It seems everyone doing this picture is decreasing saturation in some way. When I first looked at the picture, I was thrown off at how vivid the foliage looked. Thanks!
