In 2003, my first photography trip that I took with a professional instructor was with Michael Reichmann and his Luminous Landscape web site. Canon has just introduced their first professional digital cameras. The Canon EOS 1D and the Canon EOS 1Ds. Michael had encouraged me to buy both so I did just before the trip in February.
We first went to the gulf coast for a few days, then the pacific coast for a few days, and then in the mountains which run down the middle of the country. It was while we were at the pacific coast that Michael wanted to teach us about exposure bracketing. This is where you take the same image at three different exposures trying to capture the full dynamic range of the scene. The early cameras in particular had a very small dynamic range so with a sunset for example, the sun would come out as a blown out white spot while the shadows of the foliage would come out pure untextured black. By taking three exposures, the first would be under exposed to capture the sun correctly, the second could capture the general scene, while the third would be over exposed to capture the details in the shadows.
This was back in 2003. Adobe Lightroom didn't even exist and Adobe Photoshop was very nice but, relative to today's Photoshop, was quite primitive. The three images were merged by using masks created by hand. It easily took most of a day to create the finished image from the three original images. But that was then...
Today, Adobe Lightroom can do this with a few clicks. That feature isn't new. It has been with us for quite some time. But I've never tried it with the images from Costa Rica so I thought I would try. In the process, I was reminded of the "tought times" of days gone by. When looking at the images, they are covered with dust spots. The first digital cameras did not have any features to remove dust from the sensor and so ugly blobs would be on the images. It was also before anyone had come out with a real method of cleaning the sensors. Today, that problem has been solved and rarely do I spot any dust spots on images. Again, fortunately, a fairly old feature in Lightroom makes it easy to retouch the images and remove the dust spots.
But I did get to use a new feature just introduced into Lightroom and that is the automatic masking of Landscape photos. Lightroom can automatically, and with pretty good accuracy, mask the various parts of a landscape image such as the sky, water, and foliage. I used that to adjust the foliage a bit. Start to finish, the editing I did on the image today was probably less than an hour; much less than the half day to full day of editing needed back in 2003.
Link to images: Costa Rica 2003
And the image:
