Balancing An Image – Think Nik Viveza 2

Painted Hills, John Day Fossil Beds National Monument
Canon 5DMKIII, 70-200mmL II + 1.4x teleconverter @ f/11, 1/4 second, ISO 100, Singh-Ray LB Warming Polarizer

Back in my teenage days, I spent untold hours learning the craft of developing and printing black-and-white film. Of course I read and re-read every Ansel Adams book I could find, but my Bible, so-to-speak, was his trifecta: The Camera, The Negative and The Print. I still at times refer back to the latter of the three as Ansel’s insights on how  he envisioned and read a print were revealed (I highly recommend reading this book). The key for him was previsualization at the time of capture. He often said his prints were not meant to represent reality; instead, they represented his vision. Al Weber, whom I have had the privilege to meet on several occasions, taught with Ansel for 20 years and confirmed that indeed Ansel would have loved digital. For the great master, the capture and processing of an image was a two-step process that had to work in harmony. This is no different from what we do today; though, I must admit, I’m not sure if most amateurs have a clear vision of what they would like the scene that they are capturing to look like in the finished process. My belief is that they just lack the consistency of day-to-day processing that most pros do. The more comfortable one becomes with his/her workflow, the more intuitive this all becomes.

My digital workflow is simplified into two parts: global corrections (via the Raw Processor) and initial tonal corrections in Photoshop, then localized corrections (balancing the image via lightening and darkening areas of the image – in the black-and-white darkroom we referred to this as dodging and burning). For my workflow, I go directly to Nik Viveza 2 when it comes to balancing an image. Ansel always taught to work the eye to the center of the image. He did this by careful burning-in of the brighter areas of the scene and always finished a print with a subtle burn around the perimeter of the frame.

Here is how the image looked straight out of the camera with some RAW adjustments. My goal is to come out of the RAW converter with the image a bit on the flat side. There was a heavy overcast on the day I captured this image (in fact, it started raining shortly after capturing this image) so it was flat light to begin with:

My next step was to make a global contrast adjustment using Nik Color Efex Pro 4’s Pro Contrast:

As you can see, this image needed some balance of tones. First off, the eye is always directed to the brightest part of the scene (Design Theory 1A); thus, in this uncorrected image, the eye wants to constantly drift towards the sky. The bottom left corner of the frame is also brighter than the middle of the frame – not good. By simply placing Control Points (and using smaller circles), I was able to effectively tone down the sky and perimeter of the frame as seen in this next screen shot:

In total, I used 14 Control Points all dealing with simply lightening and darkening. Notice now how the eye works towards the center of the frame! I feel this is a much more balanced image.

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 Category: Landscape Photography      Tagged: John Day Fossil Beds, National Monument, Nik Veveza 2, Oregon, Paionted Hills

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