Painter of Skies

June 2, 2008

IMG_2381.CR2Yesterday evening was spot on with one of the prettiest sunsets I’ve seen here. The colors were absolutely amazing and the whole scenario unfolded during an hour or so…

When I see the eventual result of the picture I took, there’s still always a bit of disappointment. For example, on the photo here you do not see the light purple tones of the hills of the Outer Isles. I experimented with shutter speed and aperture but was unable to capture it…

Anyway, this one is nice and gives an impression of the spectacular colors…

The full size picture is on FLICKR.

Posted by roger | Filed Under Blog, Nature 

Comments

6 Responses to “Painter of Skies”

  1. val on June 3rd, 2008 6:06

    Fabulous! What time was that ? I must have been in the Land of Nod. But then, I do catch the sunrises, though not this morning now that we have some rain.

  2. roger on June 3rd, 2008 8:08

    Erm, I think at about 10:30pm…

  3. Alan Campbell on June 5th, 2008 11:11

    you are a lucky luck man ! there must be a word to describe that scene but i dont know it - fandabbydozy - as a silly Scottish act used to say…..

  4. Ian Norris on June 12th, 2008 14:14

    One way of getting the image you want may be to extend the dynamic range of the picture. You could do this by taking the picture, then taking, say, two more, one exposing for the shadows and another for the highlights. These can be blended to form a single image. There is a free program called TuFuse that will do this, but it is a command line program and not too easy to use. TuFuse Pro, which I use, adds a user friendly front end, but costs, I think, around £20. Full details of the program and method are at http://www.tawbaware.com/tufuse.htm

    There is a similar program called Photomatix, although this also allows you to produce HDR (high dynamic range images) as well as exposure blending.

    I played around with your picture in Photoshop and got your purple hills back!!

  5. roger on June 15th, 2008 22:22

    An impressive piece of software. Unfortunately it’s only available for Windows and not for Mac OS X…

    I did some Photoshopping a while back with a photo of the loch view from our kitchen window and a photo I had from Eilean Donan castle. See it here: http://www.skinidin.com/mysterious-loch.htm

  6. Ian Norris on June 16th, 2008 10:10

    Pity about TuFuse being Windows only. Photomatix (http://www.hdrsoft.com/) is available in a Mac version, but costs around £52 unfortunately. There is a trial download, but this leaves a watermark on the image. Doubtless there are other, similar, programs out there.

    I’ve had some success with low range images by creating additional images in Photoshop (Image - adjustments - exposure). By taking the original and creating two images, one -1 stop and another + 1 stop you can use a program like Photomatix to exposure blend all three and, hopefully, end up with an image where the burnt out highlights and blocked up shadows have been recovered. Of course, this only works if there is some detail in these areas on the original image. I haven’t used Photoshop too much lately - although I do use it a lot during the dark winter nights.

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