November 24, 2011
Mountain Gorilla Silverback of the Sabinyo Group in Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda

I've been going through the images I brought back from Africa this spring and processing them through Photoshop, and I've reached the images from my photo tour to Rwanda for the Mountain Gorillas. This image is one of the silverbacks from the Sabinyo Group (or "Sabyinyo Group") from our first of five days of gorilla trekking.

As I mentioned in the blog entry for February 21, 2011, the thin cloud layer with scattered dense clouds wasn't the best for photographing the dark gorillas with recessed eyes, but fortunately they were out in the open so we didn't have to deal with mixed light filtering through the forest canopy. There was still a lot of unwanted contrast, and the image for February 21, 2011 was obtained by processing a single RAW file three times to to bring out detail in the shadows and the highlights, and then combining them by hand in Photoshop. That was my standard work flow at the time and the image looked OK on my laptop when I processed it in the field.

As I was going through the images back in the office with my accurate Eizo ColorEdge CG210 display, I tried using the Shadow and Highlight sliders in Capture One, and boy did that work wonders! The image in this post is from one RAW file processed once using judicious Shadow and Highlight recovery, and it looks a lot better than the complicated image under similar lighting conditions on February 21, 2011.