The hay field and raw processing

Here I show how I took a landscape picture of a hayfield and the minor adjustments I made to the raw file. If you are unfamiliar with raw processing, Complete Digital Photography, by Ben Long, has an entire section dedicated to it. Digital Camera World has a series of step-by-step tutorials on how to process raw images in Photoshop Elements, and there are a number of u-tube videos and tutorials on the Internet on how to do it in various other programs.

It was hay harvest a while ago near my house, and I though it would be a good opportunity to practice landscape photography in the morning. One day, before sunrise, I walked to the field armed with my tripod, DSLR camera, and not enough clothes to keep me warm (seriously, make sure you have weather-compatible clothes when you go out shoot).

I started out with a relatively wide angle (44 mm) shot of the entire field, in aperture priority. I was not sure how to set the exposure, but I knew that I wanted depth of field. I took three shots at f/8, f/10 and f/13, and I ended up choosing the latter to display.

To take the shot, I mounted the camera on a tripod, put it in manual focus (when there is little light like that, the automatic focusing does not work so well), disabled picture stabilization, focused on the second square right about 6 m from me, and using the timer, I took the picture below, which is the jpeg version generated by the camera.

18-5- mm kit lens at 44 mm, ISO 160, f/13, 1/30

Ok, this is not the picture of the century, I know it. But I liked it and though I could make it a little better. Specifically, I wanted to add some more contrast an get rid of some unwanted elements: a guy running on the right hand corner of the frame, and the lateral hay squares, which were a little blurred. Since I was shooting in raw mode (the camera generates a jpeg for preview also), I opened the picture in “camera raw” of Photoshop Elements 9. To do this you simply open Photoshop Elements, click file-open, then select the raw file.

In camera raw, I made the following adjustments (enlargement of the right hand window of the picture above):

Then I clicked on the triangle icon between the shutter and the camera signs, and sharpened the picture. I also used the luminance noise reduction, since there was a good amount of noise after sharpening. Sharpening needs to be done at 100% magnification.

I then clicked the “open image” button on the lower right hand side. (Remember that when you process a picture in “camera raw”, every modification you make is reversible, whereas modifications after you open the file in Photoshop are not necessarily so.)

I still wanted a little more contrast in the sky. I cropped the picture to get rid of the unwanted elements. To increase the contrast in the sky, I applied a “graduated filter” using Photoshop Elements, a method that is nicely explained in this u-tube video. The resulting picture is below:

final verison
18-5- mm kit lens at 44 mm, ISO 160, f/13, 1/30