Ice #111: Before and After

Ice #111. Eldorado Springs Canyon, Colorado, 2012

What you see above is after post-processing. At the end, I’ll show you what I started with.

In this case, I knew in my mind exactly what I wanted–I wanted that weird hunk of ice surrounded by a field of black, pretty much as you see it in this post. However, because of the terrain, the running creek water, and the thin ice along the bank, there was no way I could get close enough or the right angle to isolate the ice in the frame exactly the way I wanted, so I knew I would eventually be cropping away a lot of extraneous material. I also was well aware of the distracting background behind the ice, so I knew I would be using a selection tool to select and fill those areas with black. During the black and white conversion process (yep, I wanted it B&W from the beginning) I also planned on using one of the “high structure” presets in Silver Efex Pro 2 as a starting point to bring out the detail in the ice.

So, even before I made the capture, I knew what I wanted it to look like after post-processing and, ultimately, as a large print.

Does that always happen? No! Sometimes I don’t really “see” the image until later, as I am culling the good shots from the bad, or when I am actually in the post-processing stage. Ideally, though, that is my goal–when I see something with potential in the field I want to be able to visualize what it will look like as a print as well as have a general idea of what steps I’ll need to take to get there. I know that won’t happen all the time and I’m OK with that, too…I welcome serendipity anywhere along the chain of the photographic process.

By way of self-critique, there are two areas I need to work on with these types of images. First, I need to work on the transition (feathering) between the ice and the black areas. Second, I need to pay more attention to these transitions in another way–the left “stalagmite”, for instance, needs some very subtle cloning work to round out its tip a little more as it distracts the eye a bit. I did this with the large stalagmite on the right (compare the images), but wasn’t paying complete attention to everything.

OK, now here is the above image as it came out of the camera…I think you’ll see just a slight difference. (To clarify a bit, I shoot both RAW + JPEG Fine. What you see below is simply a resized version of the original, untouched JPEG with fairly neutral in-camera picture settings. The above after image was created by working on the RAW file in Lightroom then Photoshop.):

Ice #111, before post-processing…