Evening Light in Monument Valley +Edit

[AlanLichty]

This image is best described as a monumental salvage job as the original appeared almost black below the horizon. I was honestly surprised I could resurrect this much color and detail out of the deep shadows but was glad current generation software could perform the task. I applied a pano crop the trim off some uninteresting sky and a bit too much foreground down in front.

Edit - I didn't like the lack of contrast in the foreground area and did some more tweaks:

C&C always welcome.

 

[JimFox]

Love it Alan!

It's amazing just how much our processing tools have improved through the years. For as much as cameras have improved through the last 20 or so years, I would contend that image processing tools have improved even more!

So great work with this.

 

[AlanLichty]

Love it Alan!

It's amazing just how much our processing tools have improved through the years. For as much as cameras have improved through the last 20 or so years, I would contend that image processing tools have improved even more!

So great work with this.

Thanks Jim - the cameras have certainly improved and I suspect this would have been a much easier edit with my current system compared to this shot from a Canon 5D MkII taken 16 years ago. Editing tools from back then never came close to making this capture work.

 

[Jameel Hyder]

The improvement of software is driven quite a bit by the added GPU processing power available today.

Nice recovery job.

 

[AlanLichty]

The improvement of software is driven quite a bit by the added GPU processing power available today.

Nice recovery job.

Thanks Jameel - no question current generation hardware can handle tasks we weren't even thinking about back when I took this shot in 2010 and the software has evolved to take advantage of it. Back when I took this shot I had a 2010 Mac Pro with 12 CPU cores and 48GB of RAM. Compared to current hardware it's about like pitting a sloth up against a Formula 1 car. My current desktop is almost out of date with 10 CPU cores, 24 GPUs, and a 16 core neural engine coupled with 64GB of RAM all in one chip with a 400GB/s bus.

I did another pass at processing this image where I added more light and contrast to the foreground to get rid of the washed out feel of the drastic shadow recovery.