Golden Glow

Moving water is great fun to photograph. The changing shapes of the water as it courses downstream over rocks can provide an infinite variety of abstract shapes and interesting colors.

This was a beautiful sunny day with blue sky and sunlit trees reflecting in the stream. A slow shutter speed helps to enhance the flow of the water and smears the colors a bit.

HINT: When photographing moving water, try a variety of shutter speeds since you never know what will work best. Better to cover your bases rather than to get home and be disappointed that the shutter speed was either not slow enough to create the look you wanted, or so slow that the scene looks too mushy for your taste. Start at about 1/4 second and then slow the shutter down from there.

This image has been modified in Lightroom to bring out the latent colors. Here is the original RAW image.

BEFORE

Notice that it looks very gray with low contrast. This is a typical look for RAW images before they have been modified in Lightroom or other software. ALL images need some sort of tweaking in post-production in order to bring out the colors and contrast. If you look carefully you can see the blue and gold colors, but they are quite muted. It almost looks like a gray film was placed over the image. Again, this is the typical appearance of a RAW image in its original state.


The image was modified in Lightroom to create the final version. Admittedly, the final version was significantly boosted to punch the colors and to improve the contrast. BUT the contrast slider was NOT used. I suggest never using the Contrast slider in Lightroom since it can cause more harm than good. It is better to use the Whites and Blacks sliders to improve contrast since that allows you to control each one independently.

This image required only 9 quick and easy steps to bring out its latent beauty.
1. Highlights slider moved to -38 brought out more detail in the whites at the top of the image.
2. Whites slider moved to +34 increased the brightness of the whites.
3. Clarity slider moved to +30  improved the mid-tone contrast.
4. Saturation slider moved to +68 improved the richness of the colors.
5. Luminance slider moved to +30 (in the Details section) was used for noise reduction.
6. Yellow Luminance slider moved to +91 (in the HSL section) brightened the yellows.
7. Blue Luminance slider moved to +8 (in the HSL section) brightened the blues.
8. Yellow Saturation slider moved to +57 (in the HSL section) to richen the yellow tones.
9. Blue Saturation slider moved to +28 (in the HSL section) to richen the blue tones.

The numbers listed are specific to this image, and always vary on an image by image basis. It is best to experiment with the sliders on your own images to see what changes work best for each different image.

TECH SPECS
1/2 sec. at f/22, ISO 100. Canon 24-105mm f/4L IS II lens on Canon 5D Mark III body. Gitzo tripod with Really Right Stuff bullhead.

TODAY'S QUOTE: "If I saw something in my viewfinder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up."  -- Garry Winogrand