Color Corrected Image

Looking Glass Falls in Autumn 2

It is a slow week this week blog wise. I am still working on the histogram post. I am having trouble getting images of histograms for illustrations. It is difficult to discuss them without a visual reference. Plus, our plans fell through this past weekend. My parents had come up to visit and we planned to go to a local festival. However, it rained all weekend and we decided to stay in. We still had a good visit though, and that is all that really matters.

More after the jump.

One thing that I have been working on is a color corrected version of an image I took last Autumn. The photograph up top is the result of the color correction. The original had a slight blue cast to it that was particularly pronounced in the water itself. The original photograph is shown below for comparison.


Looking Glass Falls in Autumn

I had been wanting to make some prints of this image, but color cast had been getting on my nerves so I hadn't ordered any prints. I spent a few days on and off working on the image to remove the blue cast. At first I tried simple white balance adjustments. However, none of the adjustments made really satisfied me. While they corrected the water, the other colors were affected too much for my liking. Eventually, I used a combination of the HSL color range saturation and lightness adjustments. Those allowed me to target just the blue ranges leaving the other colors alone. Plus, I could use those other color ranges to put a little more pop into the colors that was lost by removing the blue tones globally. I am much more satisfied with the photograph now.

One other adjustment that gave me problems was sharpening. I had originally processed this in Nikon Capture NX 2. However, when I reprocessed it with Lightroom 2 / Photoshop I seemed to loose some fine detail and crispness that I had in the original version. I finally pulled out a couple of my Photoshop CS4 books and tried a couple of other sharpening methods and got results that I was much more pleased with. I'm not sure that the final image has quite as much detail as the Capture NX2 version, but it is so close now that it is hard for me to tell the difference.

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Mountains and Waterfalls

Looking Glass Falls

Well, it is Autumn and that means it was time to head up into the mountains for the annual color hunt. We went a different route this year. Instead of heading up to Asheville, NC first; we took US Highway 276 up the escarpment toward Brevard, NC. Along the way we stopped at the Bald Rock overlook and Caesar's Head State Park in South Carolina. A big rain system was moving through the area and gave us equal amounts of dramatic clouds, overcast skies and rain until finally clearing out after lunch. Then we went through Pisgah National Forest to the Blue Ridge Parkway. We headed south on the Parkway for a while, but the higher elevations there were heavily clouded so we turned around and head back toward Asheville, NC. We had lunch at the Mount Pisgah Picnic Area on the Park and the front started to clear out afterward. Finally we traveled to Chimney Rock, NC before heading home. The seasonal colors had not yet started at Chimney Rock. Most of the trees there were still green.

The photograph above is from Looking Glass falls in Pisgah National Forest near Brevard. It is easily accessed as it is right along the highway through Pisgah National Forest. A couple more after the jump.


Bald Rock Panorama
This is the first panoramic photograph that I have made by stitching together separate photographs. This particular image was made from three over lapping photographs. I used Microsoft's free Image Compositing Engine software to merge the photographs together. It was very easy to use, and I like the results and that fact that it was free.

The Illuminated Bush
There was a small rainbow at the top of Caesar's Head when we were there. A light cloud was coming over the mountain and into the foothills below where it caught the sunlight and gave us this part of a rainbow. It was almost close enough to touch.

Colorful Blue Ridge Mountains
A shot of the Autumn colors exploding in a valley along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Lake Lure
This shot was taken from the parking lot of the Chimney Rock Park's Visitor Center. I found it interesting that the trees had not started changing colors here yet while they have already started back home.

There are more photographs from the trip over on the Zenfolio gallery.

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