August 27, 2011
Clements Mountain At Dusk in Glacier National Park, Montana, and Fixing A Mask At A High-Contrast Edge

Last night we returned to the Hanging Gardens area near Logan Pass in Glacier National Park, and we came prepared with our gum boots so we could cross the main drainage without getting wet. Unfortunately, there were only a handful of clouds way to the north — not in the correct place for photography. So, I turned my attention to compositions that didn't include the boring blue sky. After sunset, I formed a composition that included the purply sky and one of the cascades that I had been photographing looking upstream. I was drawn to the slight color in the sky and the large "pool" that was reflecting the color in the right-center part of the composition. I made four exposures to capture detail throughout the scene, then combined them by hand in Photoshop.

Fixing A Mask At A High-Contrast Edge

I used a new technique to blend the foreground and sky that I learned about from one of Moose Peterson's recent blog entries. First, I created a mask like usual by selecting one of the color channels (blue or green I think) and then performed a Levels adjustment on the mask to exaggerate the split. This left a very slight halo, like one or two pixels wide, in the sky that was too bright. To remove the halo, I created a new layer (Layer > New > Layer…) just above the layer with the not-so-perfect mask, selected the Clone Stamp tool set to Luminosity and then set the mode of the whole layer to Darken. Then I set the Clone Stamp source to some sky just beyond the halo and then painted along the halo. The painting didn't have to be precise because only the pixels that were too bright, the halo, would be effected.