Sunday, April 13, 2014

Photo: Desert Dunes

Desert Dunes
Copyright Laura A Knauth, All rights reserved.
Please contact me for any usage or licensing options.
Desert patterns of the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes just before sunset.

Location
Death Valley National Park, California

Technical Info
Canon 50d
Tokina 11-16mm Lens, 16mm
f/13, 1/125s, ISO 100

Playing around with the "Diffuse Glow" filter in Photoshop (Filter => Distort => Diffuse Glow) really gave me the stark, desaturated look I had been hoping for when I took the original image. In real life, the sun reflected off of the sand ripples and across the background mountains really giving a harsh desert feel to the environment. The camera captures whatever it can, and then it's a huge process to infuse the image with original feeling of being there on the day. The Diffuse Glow filter option seems to work well when there is sufficient contrast in the image, so I did some work on the Midtone contrast first before using this filter to achieve the results you see here.

For reference, this was the original image out of Bridge (I tweaked a few knobs here from the original image, but do most of my work in Photoshop):
Copyright Laura A Knauth, All rights reserved
Original Image for "Desert Dunes"
Hope these ideas help you too!

Blog Post by Laura A Knauth

1 comment:

  1. Laura A Knauth,

    We tried to email you at email@lauraknauth.com but the email bounced.

    We just wanted to let you know how much we enjoyed playing the interactive fiction game Winter Wonderland from back in 1999. It's been a good counterbalance to all the bad news lately.

    It's made the quarantine easier, and we appreciate all your efforts.

    It was a challenge both for Sara (Mom) and David (son), but we were glad to help get her back home again. She is/was an amazing young girl! We need all the positivity we can get whether in games or life stories.

    We like the photo from Death Valley also, and the other photos are wonderful.

    Feel free to email back to address friedmansara AT hotmail DOT com.

    Sara Friedman and David Friedman

    ReplyDelete