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Adobe Photoshop at the Bottom of the World:
Enhancing Mother Nature's Ice Sculptures with Photoshop CS2
By © Rick Sammon
For me, photography is a 50-50 deal: 50 percent image capture, 50 percent image enhancement.
In this article, I'd like to share with you some of the basic enhancements I made to a few of the images I took on a recent trip to the bottom of the world, the white continent: Antarctica.
I was aboard the Russian ship the M/V Professor Multanovskiy, which is outfitted for photographers and travelers like myself. I booked the trip (actually promoted as an expedition) to the Antarctica Peninsula through Quark Expeditions (www.quarkexpeditions.com), a specialist in Polar exploration.
All of the photographs in the article were taken with my Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II and EOS 1D Mark II cameras and Canon lenses.
Okay, let's go!
I shoot only Raw files, because JPEG files toss away 1/3 or more of the file information, usually in the highlight
areas. I use Adobe Camera Raw to process my files before further enhancements and corrections in Photoshop.
To enhance the color of the blue ice, I went to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation and boosted the Saturation.
Even without the Photoshop enhancement, the ice was very blue (old ice is bluer than new ice).
I have found that the best way to increase the contrast of an image in Photoshop is to go to use Curves and then to make an "S" curve.
Are you into black-and-white images? If so, skip Grayscale. Go to Image > Adjustment > Channel Mixer and check the Monochrome box. Play around with the sliders for total creative control.
Go beyond black-and-white with Duotones: Image > Adjustments > Grayscale - and then go back to Image > Adjustments Duotones. Play around with Duotones, Tritones and Quadtones.
In case you are wondering how I got the idea for this article about enhancing Mother Nature's ice sculptures, check out this photograph. Cool, don't you think? If that's not a reclining polar bear, I don't know what is!
By the way, when photographing white subjects, set the exposure compensation on your camera to +1 for a more accurate exposure (because all that white can fool your camera's exposure meter into thinking that the scene is brighter than it actually is - resulting in an underexposed picture).
Here's a picture of me in the "freezer" and a photo of me in my cabin (working on my images in Photoshop between landings and Zodiac cruises). Taking pictures was the easy part. Working in what I called my "Sammon Wrap" in the chilly conditions was the hard part.
Naturally, these pictures would not have been possible without the help of the crew and experts aboard the M/V Professor Multanovskiy. Thanks guys for the once-in-a-lifetime experience!
Rick Sammon Bio
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