Cornflower, Paintbrush & Pyramid Peak, A July afternoon, on a ridge top east of Desolation Valley, brought clouds, hint of thunder showers, and summer wildflowers. Photo Geek Stuff... This is an example of some strong post processing and camera technique. This was shot in the harsh light at 3:00pm (better than noon), and the compositional elements were disguised in the foreground mass of wildflowers. I hadn't ranked it as worth post processing, but took a second look, and gave it another chance. There had been a reason that I shot this - but in looking at the RAW files it wasn't obvious. So - the final image is a focus stack of 5 hand held exposures, with initial exposure, contrast, color, shadows, and highlights adjusted in Lightroom. The 5 exposures were aligned and blended in Photoshop, resulting in very sharp detail from near to far. I then added curves and levels layers for contrast, a touch of digital gardening to clean up some bright spots, cleaned sensor dust spots from the sky, darkened the whole image, lightened the center, burned and dodged to bring out some compositional elements, and for fun added a touch of Orton Glow. Now I'm glad that I didn't delete the RAW files. A look at the original RAW files is in the comments - quite a difference! #pyramidpeak #desolationvalley #wildflowers #postprocessing #danholmesphoto #landscapephotography #protectourpubliclands (at California) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bx0FEU_ARHR/?igshid=1po6s11eium2b
