Lake Goss Sunrise

I hadn’t taken a lot of shots lately, been busy with other things; but the family and I took a long weekend to the Toivola cabin 8/14–15 which was almost precisely HERE. It was a great time, had some good food, good friends, and mediocrely behaved dogs. All in all, a great weekend. The girls learned how to swim with lifejackets on, they also learned how NOT to swim with one off — they sunk like a ton of bricks when they tried to swim without them. Thanks Ayla for teaching them to swim on Wednesdays, they clearly like it a lot!

Anyway, with the photo itself, it was a unique one in that it was a perfectly clear morning, no texture in the sky and very little on the water. I loved the composition of the shot so I wanted to bring it out. A lot of people ask the process, well for this one it was:

1. It was a .jpg file so I pulled it up in Photoshop and sharpened the image.
2. I then went to the “exposure” dropdown and pulled the gamma down so it’d be darker in the bright spots (better contrast).
3. Opened Photomatix and used the darkened image and the original image to put a light HDR feel to it. Fiddle with the settings here, to each their own.
4. Saved that photo and pulled back into Photoshop, dug into my standard background texture file and pulled out 2 I liked. Created separate layers for them, set the opacity down on them, and set the first one (scratches) to a soft ‘overlay’ and about 35% opacity and the 2nd one (brown mesh frame) to ‘screen’ and opacity to 20%.
5. Saved and popped it into Adobe Lightroom and tossed in a ‘general punch’, and ‘basic bam’.
6. Back to Photoshop to clean up the edges and edit out a few watermarks that showed on my poorly cleaned 10–24mm Tamaron lens.

That’s the long and the short of it, but I do like doing these projects that are a bit off the norm of shooting though. It was a good weekend had by all!