I got up a little earlier than usual and pussyfooted around the RV. I started to process images from Mt. Evans through Capture One (C1) to assign final file names and convert the RAW files to TIFFs. I had my usual breakfast when J got up then continued to process images trough Capture One (C1). I finished the images through Camp Hale, then did some file management to store the images and back them up.

I started to work on the test image that I had run through Photoshop CS5 HDR Pro on July 1, 2010. You might recall that the shadows were extremely noisy after processing the seven exposures through HDR Pro, and the first thing I wanted to do today was insert the properly-exposed capture for the shadow area. Well, when I tried to slide the shadow exposure onto the HDR'ed image, I was warned that the color spaces weren't the same. The shadow exposure was in ProPhoto, as I wanted the whole image to be, but the HDR'ed image was in sRGB IEC61966-2.1 — definitely not what I'd like my working copy of an image to be in! That happened because I had set up Photoshop to use sRGB IEC61966-2.1 as the default working space, and that usually only gets applied when I sharpen an image for output to the web. :( So, I changed Photoshop to use ProPhoto as the working color space then reran HDR Pro to create an HDR'ed image that was in the ProPhoto color space. Then I processed it as usual like I was going to keep the image (below left). The shadows are still extremely noisy and the area around the sun is totally blown out just like it was on the first run through HDR Pro. Then I went back to the plain HDR'ed image and inserted the exposure for the shadows (1/8 sec). That fixed the nastiness on the formation and also on the foreground desert. Next step was to work on the blown-out sun. I ended up adding the 1/30 sec and 1/125 sec exposures to clean up the starburst. I didn't try adding any of the shorter exposures to recover the rest of the sun — it was becoming too much work for not much gain. Then I processed the image as usual, and ended up with a much better overall image (below right) than by just running HDR Pro. For this image, HDR Pro was able to handle the sky fairly well, and much better than I could do by hand because the clouds had moved so much from the start to the end of the exposure sequence. However, I'm baffled by the way it handled the shadows, but I was able to fix that by hand fairly easily.


I had lunch around 12:30. Then I processed the recently renamed blog images for a stock submission, and that got me about 70% of the number of images I usually submit. :) I set up my Photography Newsletter for the web. Then I worked up the blog entry for yesterday and started to work on the blog entry for today. J left around 4:45 in the Jeep to go photograph by herself. I processed images for a stock submission. One of my favorite images that I processed is of sunset at Swiftcurrent Lake in Glacier National Park from August 2008 (below left). The image was created by combining three exposures by hand in Photoshop. I also tried to use HDR Pro, and there was severe misalignment of the evergreen trees on the horizon in the right part of the image. J returned around 6:25 just as a rain shower was letting up. Shortly afterwards, the sun broke through a gap in the cloud and there was a spectacular double rainbow right outside! We quickly went out and photographed it (below right).


We had dinner at 7:10 of Bertolli Chicken Florentine & Farfalle.

After dinner, I processed more images for a stock submission.

Correction: I photographed Barbey's Larkspur yesterday.