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Photo: The very top of the Cana Island lighthouse looking over trees as seen from across a nearby bay.

Another, more closer to Earth view of the Cana Island lighthouse that was featured last week in the Before and After series. I grabbed this shot with my point and shoot after seeing the view from the road on the way back to our hotel.  Didn’t even get out of the car, just opened the window and snap.

I brought out more of the trees and surface of the water with Topaz Detail and the Feature Enhancement preset.

Follow-up to Yesterday

In yesterday’s post I posed the question of which whether the use of Topaz Adjust or Topaz Detail worked better with that particular image. I had a few comments on Flickr with some good feedback, and if you’d like to weigh in, please do.

– Kris

Photo: Series of waves washing on the shores of Wailea Beach, with clouds over West Maui near the horizon.

Now that I’m sort of back in business with my laptop situation, I wanted to throw in a few paradise shots before getting back into all the hockey images from the last two Chicago Wolves games I shot.

First, The Composition

Before I get into the detail conundrum I’m in, I wanted to say I really liked how this composition came out. Not just with the waves and the trees, but the clouds over the mountain as well.

Contrast that with this similar shot that has a more wider feel to it, and you’ll see what I mean.

Now, The Conundrum

This image made its way through my workflow with a stop in Topaz Adjust, the new Version 4.0.  I’ve been using TA for a few months, and this one is with one of the new presets named “Detail – Strong”.

Now, I also did this same image with Topaz Detail, which I’m just starting to experiment with.  You can view those results on Flickr here.

The Vote

Which one do you prefer?  I’ve added a call for input on both images on Flickr, but if you’re not part of the Flickrverse, please leave your thoughts here or on Facebook when the post is published there shortly.

Many thanks in advance,
- Kris

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: Taken at the top of many cliffs during a hike along the northern end of West Maui.

At first this might seem like a typical landscape photo looking into the vast Pacific Ocean. Maybe it’s not even that interesting during an initial flyby when flipping through a stack of photos. But there’s a few things I like about this shot that I wanted to share.

• Look down there, tiny little people. Both at the very bottom of the image and down by the water – just below center. Goes to show you just how high up we were.
• See that peak there just before the giant volcano in the background? That’s Kahakolua Point, which I also captured later that same week during my helicopter tour. I thought that was pretty neat that you can see it from here.  Check out this map on Flickr to see just how far about these two points are.
• And of course, the volcano on the horizon. Okay, it’s only the dormant volcano Haleakala and not something spewing giant amounts of lava. But it’s intriguing to me that you can see it in the distance from so many places around the island.

So, maybe this image isn’t going to be hanging up on someone’s wall anytime soon or may not get attention from too many others, but every now and again, I like having images that I personally find interesting or share a special meaning only to me and a few others.

That is sort of the point, right?

Photo: Looking at the tops of the West Maui mountains while cruising out on the water.

One year ago today we were on our way to Maui for our most recent 2 week stay on the Valley Isle.  This shot was taken during the dinner cruise we signed up for near the end of that visit.

While a winter/spring trip wasn’t in the cards this year, it’s always wonderful to revisit photos from our previous trips to keep us motivated to save up for that next trip.