A photographic adventure

Our daughter, Jane, wanted a photograph for the wall of their new house. She had seen one that she liked on an online art shop and wanted one in a similar style. A key difference was that she wanted a photo of not just any bush track but one of the track that runs through the bush to the block above Helidon that Lea and she have owned and camped on for a couple of decades. I was assigned to produce a suitable photograph.

We have been to the block several times over the years that Lea and Jane have owned it. It is a bit more than 30 km from home and it takes about 40 minutes to drive there down the highway and then up country roads and down an unmaintained dirt road to reach the track into the property.

I thought about driving there in the dark for sunrise photographs and decided that, because the last sections of track run roughly west to east, I would be better to go in the late afternoon. That would avoid driving the rough track in the dark and put the low sun behind the camera rather than in the lens.

One sunny afternoon in the last week of November I drove to the site, parked where the entrance track leaves the rough road, and walked along the track into the property. As I went I looked for positions where the track wandered a little into the distance and took photographs. I did the same thing on the way back to the road, turning to take photos of the track going in. I took about 80 photographs in the 30 minutes or so that I was there.

At home I processed the photos using the auto setting in Lightroom and exported them as smaller JPGs which I put in a cloud folder that I could share for Jane to look at. There were a few that she liked, though I tend to process for vibrant colours and she wanted a more muted colour treatment similar to the one she had seen online. I assured her that we should be able to process for more muted colours.

Jane’s preferred image had the winding path that she wanted but the scrub had been dark there and the cloud that appeared above the end of the track was blown out. There was nothing I could do about that directly but I had a second image taken at the same time and place in portrait mode. The cloud was still bright in that one but better exposed.

I moved to Photoshop where I was able to overlay and auto-align the two images with the portrait version on top. That replaced the cloud in the landscape image with the version from the portrait image. Photoshop did a good job of aligning the images. I then used its generative AI facility to fill in the gaps that appeared in the corners after the images were overlaid. I finished with a square composite image. The sky in that version was better and it could be cropped to the shape that Jane wanted. Unfortunately, there was banding visible where the edges of the portrait image had overlaid the landscape version. Selective erasing in Photoshop cleared the bands but the colours still needed to be muted for Jane’s purposes. I made some progress with that in Photoshop but did not seem to be able to achieve the effect that Jane wanted.

After some experimenting with selective colour editing in Photoshop and Lightroom I wondered if a LUT (Look Up Table) might be what I needed. I had seen them suggested and had played with them once in Luminar but had not really explored them. I tried tweaking Jane’s image in Luminar using some included LUTs but found nothing that suited. The same was true of the LUTs I found in Photoshop. With a bit more searching I found that Affinity Photo was able to make a LUT from an existing image and that Photoshop could import and apply LUTs.

I used Affinity Photo to make a LUT from the image that Jane was wanting to emulate. I then went back to Photoshop, imported the LUT, and applied it to the composite image. I cropped to get the end of the track where Jane wanted it, expanded the image slightly to the 6000 x 4000 pixels that she wanted and exported to JPG. For good measure I generated another version with a replacement sky in Photoshop. When Jane looked at them she noticed some purple fringing in the upper corners. I was able to remove that by selectively desaturating that colour in Photoshop.

I’ll be interested to see which, if either, of those images is hanging on Jane’s wall when we return from Thailand.