Showcasing the beauty of Mother Nature
A group of bull elephants on the banks of the Boteti Rover in Botswana. These males had come down from Nxai Pans to enjoy the water and the lush vegetation around the river, as the seasonal pans dried up. We watched this group cross from one side of the river to the there, stopping part way for a bath and then a wallow in the mud at the edge of the river, before carrying on their way.
I’m still doing my month of Topaz Studio editing, and decided on a different approach for the images today. I did the initial colour and tone correction in On1 Photo Raw, and then sent it over to Topaz Studio for further editing. I did that because the first image shown, of the leopard cub, was rendering so flat in Topaz Studio as a raw file that it would have taken a lot of work just to get it back to a place to start editing. I figured I would do the same for the other images, just to keep things consistent.
From a workflow perspective, it has definite advantages as the edited image appears back in On1 complete with all my keywords and other tagging that I use, so it is one less step to have to do to organize things.
Wishing everyone a great week ahead!
I flagged this image as I was going to work on it over the weekend for my raw conversion comparison that I was doing, but 3 images repeated a few times seemed to be enough so I saved it for a monochrome treatment instead.
I’m glad I did! Doesn’t this guy look striking in back and white? He was so close to our vehicle, I had to crop out bits of the Land Rover that had made it into the frame.
Wishing everyone a fantastic week ahead.
Just a quick single image post for Monochrome Monday this week.
A zebra stopping traffic on one of the roads through Etosha National Park in Namibia. The zebra were very abundant there, and quite chill around vehicles making for some nice opportunities for images. I’ve had lots of experience with zebra taking off in the other direction as soon as they realized you were looking at them.
Wishing everyone a fantastic week ahead.
Wishing everyone a great week ahead!
Even after sharing five elephants images yesterday, I couldn’t resist working on another one.
Happy Monday everyone!
I was inspired by my post yesterday on white balance to continue editing images from my time at the Skelton Coast in Namibia. Given the flat light in a lot of the images, I thought black and white edits might be a good option. I am quite happy the way the turned out.
All of the images from my time at the coast were shot with my Panasonic FZ1000, which I have mentioned before is a great and capable camera, but sometimes the quality is a bit lacking when comparing to the files I got out of my Nikon or that I now get from my Fuji. But these were shot at the start of a long trip and I thought it would be wise not to subject the Nikon to blowing sand, given its terrible habit of picking up dust particles. So, I’ve done the best with what I got that day.
I’m a little later than normal with my Monochrome Monday post as I have been playing around with using the MacPhun (now Skylum) Tonality plugin with Luminar. I must say, I am really enjoying using Tonality again!
Tonality was my go-to for black and white conversion when I was using Lightroom and Photoshop. I found I could dial in the vision I was imagining much faster than using other black and white methods. Now that I no longer have Photoshop, I am glad I have a way to integrate the plug-in back into my workflow when I want to.
I’ve started watching some Luminar videos on YouTube by Jim Nix, and one of them really resonated with me today. It had nothing to do with the image or the edits he did, but just the concept of revisiting old work to re-edit photos, to experiment with new software, filters and combinations of tools to keep your creativity and interest peeked. A lot of that is why I am enjoying this theme so much, as the lack of familiarity with the software has caused me to think a lot more critically about what I want to achieve, so I can figure out how to do it, but it has also allowed me to just open random filters to see what they do, sometimes to great result, sometimes awful. If you are interested, you can find the Luminar video by Jim Nix here.
Now on to the images for today.
For this giraffe image, I did an extra step to start, and from Luminar opened Topaz Studio and then the Topaz Remask plugin. I find Remask is excellent for complicated situations like these tree branches against the sky. The sky was very grainy, and I wanted to apply some noise reduction, and I thought that would be the best way to go. I shot this image with my Panasonic FZ1000, which is a very capable little camera, but I do find skies are generally quite noisy regardless of the ISO. There was also a lot of airborne dust so it could have been that rather than a limitation of the camera. After I created my mask in Remask, I ran the noise removal filter in Topaz Studio and sent the image back to Luminar, and then onto Tonality for black and white conversion. If Luminar had an option to adjust luminosity masks so I could isolate the sky, I would have gone that route and saved some steps, but right now its not an option.
Things were much simpler for the next two images. I edited both using the Tonality plug in, though I am sure I could have arrived at similar results just using Luminar. As with most photo editing programs, there are a lot of different paths to get to the same place. It’s all about what works for you.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my selections for the day 🙂
Hopefully no one is getting bored of leopards, after having a few posts in a row featuring my favourite cat.
If you missed the post from yesterday, you can check it out here, with lots more images of this beautiful cat.
Wishing everyone a fantastic week ahead.
A giraffe reaching for a choice morsel, high up in an acacia tree.
Because of an abundant wet season, there was a lot of food (and relatively speaking) a lot of water on offer in the desert while I was there last April.
