Heaven's Light

Heaven's Light, a photo by Tony DeSantis Photography on Flickr.

So you already know that this is not the way the shot came out of the camera. With a white balance set in the camera to shadow, this came out of the camera very warm, ok Orange!! I really liked all the sunrays and layers of light and shadows from front to back with the fog/smog setting in at sunrise over the LA basin. What took the longest to decide was the duotone hue to use. As you can see I settled for a Yellow sky and blue foreground to go up against the silhouettes of hills . Something different and not really a lot of post processing.

The Shot:

Single Exposure-F/14, ISO 400,  1/1000, -1 EV, Hand Held 1ds Mark II, 70-200L @135mm

Post Processing:

>Raw-Recovery slider, Vibrance Slider, opened in CS5 as 16bit tiff

CS-5:

>Cropped photo for best composition

>Adjustment Layer Curves-Global Contrast

>Adjustment Layer Hue/Sat-Changed Orange for Blue Tone

>Adjustment Layer Hue/Sat-Changed Blue for Yellow tone/Masked and used Gradient tool for duotone effect

>Adjustment Layer Curves-increase contrast in Sunrays

>Adjustment Layer-Levels-increase black in foreground hills for better silhouette effect and a tad more overall contrast

>Topaz Denoise-Overall to really soften global look

>Framed and Sized for posting