A photograph is hidden in RAW #5 : Midday Landscape Photography.

Let's see how I created this picture.

A photograph is hidden in RAW #3 : Waterfall magic.

This fall it was all about intimate landscapes for me. I just wanted to see how I do with small waterfalls in nearby Meghalaya. After so many visits I know exactly which one I will go for.

This particular one is right by the main road but a little obscured, that keeps it hidden from the common tourist footfall.

Although the waterfall looks very small here as I used a ultra wide lens but it's height is easily above 20 feet. I was with few of my fellow photography enthusiast friends, and we all loved this small intimate fall.

For this picture I used my trusty Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 lens on a Nikon D7200 body. As the sun was on my left shoulder and making the wet rocks shine, I thought why not used a polarise (CPL) to cut out the reflection from there. I was very interested in showing the texture on the rocks and pop out the colours of the forest above and the rocks below using the CPL. Now the CPL was giving me about a single stop of difference in light so I compensated by increasing the shutter speed by one full stop to 1/5 sec. 

This made the falling water a little smooth but I wanted more. So I brought out the the 16 stop Neutral Density filter in front of the CPL. This gave me a long enough shutter speed of 4 sec which, was enough to have this beautiful smooth water flow effect and a very interesting splash spread at the bottom. As soon as I saw these frames on my camera LCD, I knew I got a special shot in my bag that day.

Phone shot of the location ans setup.

Back at the processing table I used Adobe Lightroom to balance the tones took it to Photoshop for detailed processing. With a little bit of messaging the picture I reached this final state, which I was quite contempt with.

Till the next picture, keep clicking!!

You can visit my Facebook page and 500px page to view and review my work.

A photograph is hidden in RAW #2 : Processing a Milkyway frame

I always wondered how it might feel to see the milkyway with your own eyes. So we packed up for a night shooting trip to Cherrpunji hoping for clear skies and the view of the majestic.

We got first time lucky and it felt awesome so see it, as you see it in the picture here.

Emotions apart some of my friends asked me to show how I produced this view. So here it is...

This is a single 25 second exposure shot on Nikon D7200 and Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 at 11mm f2.8 ISO1600. So here is the standard before and after :)

Now here are the steps how I reached here.

Triple processing.

I prepared the image on Lightroom by triple processing it. 

#1 is for the Milkyway with some clerity and contrast to the sky.

#2 is for the warm foreground and the tree fixing the white balance.

#3 for the storm clouds with lighting to maintain some details in its highlights.

Now I opened all three files as layers in Photoshop, keeping the tree frame in the bottom. 

Milkyway frame in the middle and used a mask to only show the milkyway on it.

On top of that I kept the storm cloud frame and used a mask to just bring out the detail in the clouds.

After that I used three selective contrast curve adjustment layers to add and subtract contrast in the clouds, reflecting water and the mid ground rocks.

Then I enhanced the colours in the sky independently to the milkyway centre and the storm clouds.

And finally added a little bit of bright midtones and warmed up the foreground. And voila its done.

I hope this will help you processing you own milkyway shot. 

You can visit my Facebook page and 500px page to view and review my work.

A photograph is hidden in RAW #1: Post processing a long exposure frame.

A few of my friends were interested in understanding what are the in-between steps from taking this picture from RAW to the final output.

So I thought why not write a small tutorial :)

Step 1 : Opened the RAW file in Adobe Lightroom to balance the exposure by adjusting the Highlights and Shadows and finally a little bit of increase in exposure. I fixed the White Balance of the image to what it looked like at that time. Next I fixed the lens distortion and vignetting. (I usually add a custom vignette at the last stage of the process)

Step 2 : Took the adjusted file and open up in Photoshop for further processing.

Step 3 : Added a fast exposure of the same frame and using a inverted mask brought in the static leafs of the trees.

Step 4 : Now I merged all the visible layers to create a new merged layer and opened that with Color Efex Pro 4 to add some Polarization. This has increased the vibrancy on the foliage and given some contrast to the clouds.

Step 5 : Next I used Silver Efex Pro to convert the image to B&W also added additional contrast to enhance the dynamics.

Step 6 : Finally I used a Curve Adjustment Layer and pulled the midtones just a bit to make the image a little darker. I inverted the mask on it and painted in a custom vignette to pull the viewers eye towards the subject in the frame.

And voila its done.

As you can see once you have the basic idea of what you want to achieve, it will be just few simple steps to get there.

Although this one took not more then half hour to process. I would admit that in some of other pictures I did spend days taking breaks in between to get to the final output.

Hope you guys have enjoyed the explanation here and will excuse me for the cranky language.

Till the next picture, keep clicking!!

You can visit my Facebook page and 500px page to view and review my work.