Hallet Peak at Dawn

Last Friday (1-30-09) my friend Dave Bartlett and I were photographing Hallet Peak from Sprague Lake. Just as the sun made its first appearance the wind blew the clouds away a bit from Hallet Peak. We only had a few moments to get the shot. The temperature at the lake was about 20-degrees and we had about a 20-mph wind in our faces, blowing snow that felt like sand. Our toes were cold back at the car but it was worth it.

Rod Chandler

The scene is cool, but there is some big-time halo effects as well as some banding going on here. Was the image processed with alot of highlight/shadow recovery?

I want to emphasize that this is a very worthwhile shot to work on. Its an absolutely classic painterly landscape like a Moran or Bierstadt.

Mel, Thank you for the comment. This is my first posting so I may have made some mistakes following the "Re-Sizing & Sharpening for Web" directions. I used just a touch of highlight/shadow in the processing but not enough, I don't think, to cause any problems. My guess is that I sharpened for the web posting and that was too much. I also thought of Bierstadt the minute that peak appeared. I hope my friend Dave Bartlett will post his image. He got some nice ones too.

Sharpening is a very likely culprit here then.

The simple route for sharpening for web would be:

Resize to the desired size (say 720pixels on the long side)
Sharpen with Smart Sharpen or Unsharp Mask (depending on your version of Photoshop).
Try a setting of 100/.4/0 for unsharp or 100/.4 for smart sharpen. Then post again.

I think that it is a great image I even like it with the trees cropped out. The halo effects are a bit of a nuisance but when that are fixed it is definitely a keeper.

Yeah, sharpening is the likely problem here. There's also a lot of pixelization or noise in the blue sky and clouds. You've got the makings of a killer photo here, but your digital darkroom work doesn't appear to yet be up to your getting-the-shot work. If I were you, I'd kill this one altogether and start over with the raw file. What camera did you use? Tell us how you got to this point so we can see where the wrong turn(s) happened. That's what this forum is good for, among many other things.

I'd go a tad less on the radius than Mel. For 72 dpi shots for the web, I usually do amount at 90-100 and radius to .3, and leave threshold at 0. Also, remember to convert to sRGB.

Also, I don't think we've increased the maximum posting size of 720 pixels on the long side, have we?

Todd, Thank you for your observations. Very helpful. My digital darkroom work can stand all kinds of improvement and I look forward to learning from all of you. I use a Nikon D2XS. For this image I had my Nikon 28-200 at 98mm. The image was made at f-11, 1/6 of a second at ISO 100. Tomorrow I will repost the image using your suggestions. The image I saved to my hard drive looks much better than the one you see here. I am looking forward to seeing Dave Bartlett's posting. He was with me Friday morning and has a nice image too.

A very majestic feeling, with awesome light. Nice capture.

Sweet light n' mist! Can't wait to see what your efforts bring us Rod.

Rod, just out of curiosity, did the image have that ghastly fringing effect around the trees when you decided to post it?

Processing issues aside, this is a very cool shot.