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The edition of the Before and After series is an anniversary of sorts. It was exactly one year ago today that I took the before image that you see below, and it was during our overnight stay in the heavenly town of Hana along Maui’s east coast.

Being able to view the sunrise in Hana was a special moment for me personally, so now that I look back one year later and relive those moments, I wanted to make this image a little more special.

The Before Image

This image does a pretty fair job as-is for taking me back to that moment. There were a few things I wish I had done differently back then, and here’s a short list.

• Scout out a location the day before – it was a pretty long day driving all the way to Hana, but I still could have taken 15 minutes to find a spot before we went to dinner that night.
• Remember the tripod – left it in our cottage, and by the time I realized that I needed it (because of the low light), going back to get it would have meant missing the moment.
• Shot bracketed exposures – I wasn’t shooting HDR at the time, and I’m not necessarily saying it was a strong HDR candidate. If I had bracketed shots – and that tripod – I could have used a few other multi-RAW techniques in post.

Okay, enough with what didn’t happen and onto the after image.

The After Image

Although I may still go back and try to recover some of that orange glow around the sun, this image is where I’m leaving it for now. Wanting to make this one special, I played around with a few tricks to get to this look.

• First up was a little cropping. It ended up putting the sun closer to the middle than I prefer, but there was too many distractions in the foreground otherwise.
• Next was multi-RAW processing in ACR using a gradient layer mask to blend separate exposure adjustments for the sky and the foreground.
• To bring in more detail, I used two different tools from Topaz Labs. The first of which was Topaz Adjust by applying the Clarity preset and tweaking the Noise tab to clean up the clouds a little bit.
• Topaz Detail was then used by applying the Feature Enhancement preset to add just a little more definition to the clouds and the surface of the water.

Thoughts?

Let me know what you think or if you have any other suggestions of things I should try differently. I like the after image being a little brighter, but tried to avoid getting to bright so that it didn’t feel like dawn anymore.

– Kris

Photo: A view of the mysterious Alau Islet from the intriguing red sand next to Koki Beach near the small town of Hana, Maui.

Another image reliving our fond memories of visiting Hana last February and making the wise decision to spend a night there.

Going back to Hawaii (Photography)

No official trip plans to Maui yet, but as I’m starting to revisit my previous images of Aloha and running them through my newest workflow, I’ll be working to add a format and output step for posting to the Hawaii Photography site, too.

Of my latest images (i.e. since September), this is the first one I’m adding there, but will work to go back and upload some of my recent creations as well.  To see all my photos at HP, check out my profile page.

And if you have lovely images of Hawaii that you’d like to share with other fans/photographers of the Aloha State, be sure to sign up while you’re there.

– Kris

More Reading: More on Hawaii Photography (Dec ‘08 post)

It’s been fun being out “on location” up here in Door County, WI this weekend. I managed to take shots for a few different ideas and images that I’ll be processing when I return home, including a friend’s hockey game in Green Bay we found out about that same morning. Once I’m back home and in front of my 24” monitor in the digital darkroom, I’ll be sharing those results, soon.

In the meantime, and to keep the stream of images coming, I thought I’d start a new series to showcase some of my work in the digital darkroom and touch on some of the tools I use from time-to-time. These aren’t going to be full tutorials, more of just a little peak under the covers and maybe a little inspiration for others in the process.

For the first image in this new series, the featured tool is Topaz Adjust.

The Before Image

The image below was one I was already particularly fond of. It was taken back in April ‘08 on a visit to Maui’s east coast.

To me, this misty view of Koki Beach had a certain mystique to it, and my original attention was to enhance that aspect of the image. What happened, however, was the creation of an entirely new, maybe even more powerful, image as a result of using the Spicify preset in Topaz Adjust.

The After Image

Since I hadn’t visualized this artful look as my intended output, my initial reaction was a surprising “Whoa!” It certainly was an entirely new image, and it was love at first sight. I toned down the saturation just a tad, removed a little noise, and that was it. Sure, that mist is all but gone, but it’s not missed that much now.

More About Topaz Adjust

Topaz Adjust, from Topaz Labs, is still relatively new to me. I first heard about it from a keynote presentation by Rick Sammon entitled “Awaken the Artist Within” at the ‘09 Maui Photo Festival. I will have more to say about Topaz Adjust when I feature it as part of my revamped Software series here at the blog, but if you haven’t experienced it for yourself yet, go ahead and grab the 30-day trial from their website.

If you’re still not convinced, stay tuned to blog for more before and after images, and I assure you that you’ll be a little curious about what it can do for the large archive of photos you have on that hard drive of yours.

Thoughts?

I admit beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as we all have different tastes and dislikes. Please share your thoughts on the particular outcome shown above, as the broader range of opinions and feedback I receive helps me to gauge which direction my little experiments are headed.

As this is the first post in the new series, I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on it. As stated, my goal is to showcase a little of my creative side and maybe inspire others out there to tinker a little bit outside of what they do now. Future posts in this series will likely be less wordy, so I hope to crank them out with a decent amount of frequency.

One of the other works I put together this week while I was off from work (which went by way too fast by the way). It’s a more artistic version of this original shot of the pools at the Oheo Gulch in East Maui.

The new look is courtesy of a few tweaks to the Spicify effect in Topaz Adjust.

Thoughts?

Let me know what you think of this version versus the original one.

– Kris

Had a few hours yesterday to go through some older photos and add them to my photonelly Flickr account. Here’s one of my favorite shots from Hanawi Falls along the Road to Hana. It took three years to get this shot, and aside from getting lucky with the weather (aka no rain) the secret really was driving the road ourselves and not being rushed to shoot as part of a tour group.