A start-to-finish sunrise edit with DxO Photolab 7 - Tunnel beach, NZ

[Music] morning I am not sure at all if I'm going to get rained on or I'm going to have a glorious morning but I've got a Wii app that tells me about the potential for Sunrise and this morning had 78% which I think might be the highest I've ever seen that one go so I thought hey I I got to get out so I'm at a spot called t Beach and uh I've got a little bit of a walk ahead of me it is sort of down in that direction there I'll flip this around in just a second and uh it's it's a steep downhill and then and then unfortunately a steep uphill but you know part of the it's part of the thing so here I go it is uh certainly that time of year in the southern hemisphere where actually getting up in time to get out is probably the the worst thing had my clock set for qu to 5 this morning it's now just a little past 5:30 little bit of time before the sun rises but as always it always feels like it's a last minute Panic a last minute rush to actually get there in time I can see uh some color developing over there but I mean everything's so deep yet um but anyway it's the Wonder but I have to say I like Sunrise shots in the winter our winter much better when I can get up at 7:00 in the morning and be there in time for it I didn't take much video as I was going it never developed into too much I don't know if you can tell but it's overall pretty pretty gray and bl it's raining a bit they there was huge potential and we got a bit of color and I think maybe not a bad image I was excited to see that there are some different places to be able to stand so they've done a lot of work here um they've put better Pathways they've put places I think I think there are little concrete spots and I think those are maybe spots where they're suggesting it might be a nice place to uh to look from but one of the best things they've done here is they've cut down a lot of the a lot of the scrubby Bush that used to be between us as photographers and the view and now it's easier to get something a little nicer in your foreground which is quite cool and and not have your not have your main view obscured by stuff like gors and whatnot so yeah it's quite cool I again I don't know I don't know you know the truth will be in the putting when I get back to the computer and have a look at the images it's always just a smidge hard I find it anyway I I I look at the things on the back of the camera and yeah this is always a slightly different impression than it is when I get it onto the computer so we'll see I'm not going to do heaps of video from this um essentially I took one image from sort of just over there and just to give you a sense of what that's like so um just get this to spin around that's sort of the the bit that's got the hole jutting through it that juts out there and then that's the bit that goes over to the side just have my 24 to 70 mil lens on trying to get a bit of these these lovely brownish grasses that are around right now I felt we're going to make a nice foreground sort of element so trying to get a bit bit of that in but also not to go too wide I don't know how the color of that water is going to show up but it is just gorgeous it's really cool because just down there you can kind of see the pathway going down there's actually this is called tunnel Beach because there's actually uh a a guy a long time ago dug a tunnel from up here down to down to the beach that kind of sits in this little Cove here um so you have to go through this dark little tunnel to get down there but it's it's quite a cool quite a cool Endeavor if you don't if you don't mind tight enclosed spaces oh anyway I think I'm going to probably just have a tiny wander I'm going to check out some of the New Paths and uh start to start to make my way back home again I think so I don't think much else is going to go on here this [Music] morning now of course the trick bit which is walking back up the hill it's um not a massive climb but it's enough to kick you in the pants for sure but that's all right because it is gorgeous check this [Music] out that's what I have to look forward to on my walk [Music] here we are at the computer and here is the image that I'm going to work with today and this is the image after the edit and I'll just show you this is the image before the edit so I'll be working work on bringing that together now we can see here a few little things if you're interested in this kind of stuff shoted on ISO 800 honestly I often would have in the past tried to keep it on 100 but I was it was quite windy and I wanted to try and kind of freeze the grass decently so I wanted to get my f stop no pardon me my shutter speed up a bit while still keeping my f- stop somewhere reasonable so this is kind of where I've headed with that I wanted to try to get that little bit of extra speed and honestly working in dxo if you're watching this no doubt you know one of the massive claims to fame is how well it deals with higher isos or deals with with calming noise so in the end I don't think this will be noisy at all so with that little uh view out of the way I'll close that down got my histogram here of course this is the after image again so you can see it's nice and spread out does go up against the edge here but of course it's going to because we've got the sun and the sun in fact is that bright so I you know I think I think a few years ago I would have tried to somehow contain that but you know honestly it's it's not contained and that's okay in my opinion at this point it changes from day to day so anyway let's let's go ahead and jump into the edit so this is like I said this is sort of the the edit and and this is the starting point so I'll put it to there and then I'll make this go away so we've got a little bit more space and I'll just pop this sort of down here for now right so how will I start I'm actually going to start with a cheat it's not really a cheat but somehow applying a preset sometimes feels like a cheat um but I'm just going to crank natural on there and that actually does a lot for me now the one thing about natural of course is that sometimes for some images it can be maybe just a hair oversaturated in my opinion I'll show you in a few minutes real reasonably easy fix for that um probably the obvious one yes but I'll just I'll show you a little something right so I I've got my natural preset here but of course I want to make some tweaks with that so I'm just going to work my way through and make a few tweaks along the way so first thing I'm going to do is put my exposure up around plus 20 or you know 02 pardon me just using that awesome rightclick trick I use that all the time now I suspected that it would really grow on me and it sure did so I'm just right clicking on the line my apologies to anybody on a Mac because this does not seem to work on the Mac side of things but it does work on Windows and it's fantastic so I do my exposure up a little bit I've got as a part of that natural preset it puts a little bit of spot lighting or pardon pardon me smart Lighting on the image and I'm just going to change that over I am actually going to leave it on but I'm going to change it over to spot weighted and of course it says there's no faces detected but I don't want any faces I'm going to put two spots that I wanted to think about I'll just draw one out kind of around here and I'll draw one out also on the grass just to see what it does with that information and I think it does pretty nice things with that information I think that that makes a a nice little difference now the next thing I'll move on to is my selective tone and I'm going to probably leave that on minus5 where it is I'll leave that on 18 I might just up my Shadows just a smidge that'll probably do right there and then the blacks just to bring sort of a little more contrast back to thing I'm going to just pop that down just a little bit so this is a a little indicator of what my selective tone is doing just lifting things again so basically each one exposure I've lifted things a bit smart lighting I've lifted things a bit more but in a slightly different way and now selective tone again a bit more but in a slightly different way way and of course this image was taken really early in the day so I don't want to make it super bright it was not super bright but I do want it to have some kind of oomph so I want there to be a nice a nice we spread there now clear view another thing that's interesting about this natural preset is that it adds a little bit of clear view just a 10 and it makes a nice little difference so although historically I have not used Clear View much I do often like this tiny little amount so it's kind of changed my my opinion on that so I'll leave that on 10 and that's that's great okay I've just backed up a little bit so you might notice a little bit of a jump cut in here but I just there was something that I noticed when I was doing my spotting and I just needed to check on you know if that was on the other image and and it it makes perfect sense to me now so let me work through this so before I come off of Clear View I want to jump this up because I'm going to just fix some of my some of my really atrocious spots I won't go into huge detail with them the thing that I needed to check on because suddenly I noticed this which is no doubt a raindrop actually on my lens if I were to zoom in you'd see and you probably will see when I'm working there's little you know that you can see the rain falling in the image it's captured it so this is probably actually a DOT on my lens would be my case and it's not it it's there but it's not near nearly so noticeable when the Clear View is not cranked up so that's why I suddenly noticed it while I was spotting and I was like oh what on Earth so anyway the spotting let's do that real quick you notice I crank my clear view up which is a great trick if you've never come across that trick before and this is probably a touch big at this juncture let's see yeah that'll do fine I'm just going to do this quite quickly because I don't want to um have you guys sat there watching me find dust spots sure we all have better things to do than that okay so we'll call that good enough there's my dust spots fixed so now I will bring my clear view back down to about 10 which is where it was and I will continue on my way so the next thing I want to do and I'll just move this histogram back over here now that I can is to just do a little change with the contrast I'm going to put that on zero and I'm going to just give myself about 10 on the fine contrast I just really like the look of the fine contrast and I do want to just throw it out there you might not see fine contrast in your software it's only here if you have film pack installed which I happen to do so I get fine contrast it's um well you can you can read more on it I won't go into it again try to keep this tight sorry I know I tend to Ramble On sometimes so I'll try to keep this tight so fine contrast and now we're going to move along from here I won't do anything with the tone curve in this occasion and I'll just come over here to my color space raw white balance is on about 5200 now I know on the other image I probably experimented it was on about oh I want to say 49.95 so that's fine I'll go there just you know for consistency sake I actually the 5200 looked fine to me as well but I quite like some of the some of the more kind kind of purples and magentas that come out there to me this image you know I I quite like this image it's reasonably well framed you know I quite like the composition decently but to me the it's all about the color that has come out in this occasion and without the color it would be much less kapow so we'll leave that there $49.95 that's all good and I was just saying before about how the natural pre preset not the natural rendering the natural rendering even on its own is is quite a colorful rendering so you might come across this but especially with the preset if you come down to hsl it is on and if I just look at this um Global sort of channel here you can see that saturation and vibrancy are both up a bit there so if you are finding it too colorful just come down and turn off or tweak your hsl and that will go a long way but it it is otherwise kind of a nice color rendition in my opinion I I often like it quite a bit now moving over to the detail tab I am going to put on deep Prime I could of course use deep Prime XD which is going to try to kind of sharpen things more Etc but I'm actually reasonably happy with how sharp that is I don't know that it'll translate if I click on deep Prime XD I can visually see a little bit more crispiness to this but not necessarily crispiness that I want in this instance so I'm quite happy with d prime plus it's only 800 it's not like I pushed it that far uh and the other thing that I'll do while I'm in this detail tab is I'm just going to down my lens softness correction just a little bit and you know this is something for years I didn't even really pay attention to it this one it just happened in the background and did did its thing but I've become aware of it a bit more recently and I've noticed that sometimes especially in stuff that's got really high repeat like grass um sometimes with leaves I I find it a little too strong everything looks just a little too crispy to me so I'm just going to down this maybe to 0. five I'm kind of just picking that out of the air but I feel like that looks a little bit better to my eye and now next I'm going to just come over here to my geometry sort of tab area I need to click on Horizon and it's actually done a nice job of straightening that out for me it just did the auto setting and I already had this on auto based on keystoning and Horizon Etc so it's already sort of cropped itself in at that same ratio so that's all good now I've just got a few local adjustment sort of finishing moves that I want to do so so I'm going to come up here to my local space and I'm going to first of all grab control point it will draw and I'm going to put a couple of control points pretty big ones down here and I want them reasonably General so I'm going to actually even just down these a little bit just so they'll be more General more of like a radial rather than being selecting a particular thing and with that I just want to give it a little extra kiss of light in the center there not heaps and with that little extra kiss of light that I've given it I think it also needs a little extra contrast so I think that that's reduced the contrast just a little bit so I'm actually going to go maybe about plus 20 on the contrast so gun before and after small thing but it just gives it that little extra kiss of light to my eye I quite enjoy it call that one kiss now I want to add more control points just keep in mind if I just straight away came down and added a control point it would become part of this set because I've not told it that I want to do a new one so I'm going to do a new mask now when I click it will be an independent set with its own controls so I'm going to put one here going bring that in quite a bit one here in quite a bit there maybe there let's see so essentially with these ones I don't want them to spread out too much I tried to put them on the lighter rocks and I'm going to just up the ante a little B bit here to try and make them more specific in terms of the selection that they're doing and you can see that kind of is you know there's a bit of spill down here in the water especially but but by and large it's really putting the bulk of the effect in the spots that I've chosen now I'm just going to come down here to my selective tone and I want to increase the midtones a bit I basically want to try to drag that part of the histogram up a little bit yep I think that's looking good and I'll also give it just a little bit of Shadow lift nice now to try and maintain the contrast in this space what I'm going to do is give it a bit of Clear View yeah I think that's looking nice and then the last thing that I want to do is just make sure that the color is still nice and strong in there so I'm just coming down here to the vibrancy space and going to just bump that a bit nice so let's do a we before and after on that one should I rename it here rocks again just trying to add just a little bit of light to not make them look fake but to make them look just a little bit more like they're getting more than they actually did all right so the last one that I want to do and again I need to come here and click my plus because this is going to be a new thing and I want this one actually to be a control line and this one I'm going to put on the grass down here might just drag that up a touch I think probably this is in a fine spot but I'll I'll move it down there for good measure cool that looks quite reasonable and what I want to do here is actually just a couple of things in hsl I want to bring my Vibrance down on those Reds in the grass and then in the red space I want to bring my luminance up just a smidgen and I can just do grass and again I'll just before and after that see hopefully that'll show up on YouTube but it just takes a smidge of the intensity out of it to me the grass is a supporting character and I didn't want it to be quite as colorful as it was so anyway so there we go so my this as I do the compare button here because I still have a local adjustment selected it will only be my local adjustments that are comparing and there are different ways to do this this is just how I do it so that's what the local adjustments are doing just changing things a little bit now if I turn this off and I come to compare This Is My overall before and after so there we have it my image of tunnel Beach hope that you have enjoyed the video hope that it's been useful to you watching me doing this processing or at the very least enjoyable in some way with that I will say thanks so much for watching and I will talk again soon bye for now

Channel: DxFlow

Views: 2,762

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Id: L-sdRi0VLt8

Length: 22min 28sec (1348 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 12 2024