Whilst I’ve been back home for a while now and I’m back at work, photographically I’m still on Ka’anapali Beach, Maui. 🙂 Today’s image was taken around sunset and in vertical format, I decided that I wanted to use a piece of washed-up debris (is that flotsam?), insignificant as it may have been, as a foreground element. A fair bit of work was required in post-processing to make it effective.
Processing was done mostly in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, the steps were as follows:
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Lens Correction. I relied on the profiled setting for the 24-105mm zoom lens I was using. This corrects for linear distortion, vignetting etc. (helps to ensure those horizons are curving the right way 😉 )
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Clarity/Vibrance/Saturation. After confirming that overall exposure was correct by checking the histogram, I chose the settings:- C/20, V/12, S/17. A bit heavier on Vibrance and
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Saturation than my standard as I wanted to give this image’s colours a bit more punch. Generally, I use 7 points of both Vibrance and Saturation as my starting point. There is no right or wrong on this, of course, it’s very much a matter of personal preference or taste.
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Tone Curve. I wanted a touch more “depth” to the dark values in the image and so set the “dark” values at -5 points.
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Selective adjustments. I wanted to work specifically on the stick and the water. Firstly I selected the stick with the adjustment brush and increased exposure, brightness, sharpness and clarity (phew!) Then I selected the water and increased both the clarity and saturation.
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Spot removal. The healing brush to remove a distracting spot on the sand, from memory it was a small shell.
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Vignette. Under the “Effects” tab, a very subtle vignette (-5 points).
All that was then required was my standard finishing steps, image sizing, sharpening, noise reduction, copyright reminder text and conversion to jpeg.
![](https://www.kevindowie.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/20110317_hawaii_0078.jpg)
In upcoming posts, I’ll head to the hills! Just to prove that I didn’t spend all my time in Hawaii lounging around on the beach 🙂
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