timeimmortal

I tried another shot of the tree in Grace’s grandparents’ back yard on one of the few days during our vacation that we actually got a glimpse of blue skies. The Sun was setting when I took this, and one can discern — through the maze of branches — a fiery orange hue cast upon the upper part of the tree.

Much like the previous shot of this tree that I attempted, this shot was taken with my lens set to its widest possible setting (17 mm), which I prefer to avoid the use of when I can but which, under certain circumstances, can work out for me if I’m careful. Principally, I’m worried about barrel distortion, which on the lens in question can be quite pronounced at its shallowest focal length. Equally, though, the problem of intense chromatic aberration (especially at the borders of the photo) looms large at 17 mm.

And it was the chromatic fringing that I had to adjust for in Lightroom — this eventually required me to reduce the purple and magenta saturations to -100, and even then I don’t think I managed to clean all the offending flared colour out of the picture.

Other edits to this shot included heavier noise reduction, owing to the fact that I was shooting at ISO 800 (which is pretty high on the EOS 350D. I applied the usual calibration/Punch preset as well, to bring out the colour. And I also boosted the green and blue saturations a fair bit. Lastly, the sky required some fairly hefty highlight reduction. In spite of all the tweaking that had to be done, though, the picture itself turned out really well, for which I’m grateful.

~ by Kenneth on April 24, 2008.