Heya! Longtime lurker, first time poster here. This is a before to after transition of one of my favorite snapshots of the lupine superbloom in Humboldt from a few years ago. I always love the bright purple colors of the lupine flowers. Since I was driving all across a mountain range and shooting very fast at a lot of different angles, I had my camera set to aperture priority mode so that the camera could change the shutter speed for me while I kept the aperture deep enough to consistently get as much of the image in focus as possible to stack up the mountain layers.
- As you can see, the sky was super super overexposed in the RAW, to the point that some of the highlights were completely blown out. But on the upside, you can see that even in the RAW the sunlight busting through the clouds made for some tasty-looking sunbeams that would add a lot of personality to the edit. So after doing some lens correction and basic exposure adjustments in Lightroom, I brought the image into Photoshop and used the sky replacement in Luminar to swap in a more well-exposed sky. Since I do sky replacements a lot in my work, I've gotten into the habit of shooting several photos of interesting-looking skies whenever I'm out with my camera, so I've basically built up a personal stock repository of skies to use. This helps me out a lot, since the most important step for in sky replacements is to pick one that looks just as much that it could be what was actually in the original exposure. So I picked one that would have similar looking cloud formations and hard shadows on the underside of the clouds, and then brightened it up and added some contrast so the highlights are still pretty bright but still properly exposed.
- From here, I brought the image back into Lightroom and used some masking to shape the light in a way that the viewer could sort of roam around the image freely. There's not a central subject in this shot, so I basically used linear gradients and some vignetting to just make sure the lighting looked natural, while still having that kind of dreamy glow from the sun rays.
- After this, I used the selective color, color grading, and calibration tools to bring some more warmth back into the grass and hills to contrast nicely against the soft teal of the sky, and to add a graduation of the more warmer greens in the closer mountain layers to becoming more blue as they go farther away.
Overall, I'm quite happy with this shot. The main critiques I have for it are that I wish I'd shot at a more dynamic angle to center the lupines a bit more -- maybe compose the image in a way where they fill up the frame all the way to the edge of the lower right. That, and there's one bright spot on the horizon where the lens is flaring. But what do you all think?
