Effects used on Abhranil Das's "Mountains on the Horizon" picture of the week?

Question

I am curious about this picture of the week:

Several things don't look quite right to me, and I'm curious if these really are artifacts or my imagination. If the former, it would be interesting to know how this picture was assembled. I tried looking in the image of the week contest and hall of fame threads on meta, but this picture was in neither.

Several things bother me about this image:

1. The sky and mountains don't seem to fit. There seems to be a halo around above the mountain that looks quite unnatural. It is this deliberate, a artifact of editing, or actually due to some atmospheric effect?

2. Is the "ground fog" behind the trees and at the base of the mountain real, or something else? It looks more like a compositing artifact, but I wasn't there.

3. Where is there? Flat terrain abruptly followed by mountains is possible but unusual.

4. Is the road real or composited in. It just doesn't look right to me, but I can't say exactly why. Something about how it meets the green area doesn't feel right, and the lines in the field that keep going straight regardless of the road's existance don't seem right either. Even the texture of the road looks off. What is really going on here?

In general it would be interesting to hear how this picture was built, if it was. If real, what were the particulars of the lighting, weather, etc, that causes it to look so unreal. What in-camera and post-processing effects were used?

Answer 1

Really flattered to learn that so much discussion is going on about my photograph. I'd like to pitch in of course and tell you exactly what I did with this photo.

Here, firstly, is the unprocessed photo, that you may compare with the processed one below. This should answer many questions at once:

You get this view of Mt. Untersberg from around the middle of the Hellbrunner Strasse stretch. So yes, this is a real setting and no manipulation of the landscape etc. has been made in post-processing, except getting rid of some birds on the path with clone stamp. I hope that answers questions 3 and 4 of the OP.

However, the image still lacked detail and contrast, so I used my usual method to get a bit more action going. This involves copying it into more layers in Photoshop, tweak the levels adjustment to get the exposure of different parts right, and use brushes on masks to make those parts visible. I also use some general vibrance, photo filter adjustments etc. There's another trick I sometimes use for a glowing look depending on the photo, which I did for the field here. It is to use a blurred layer copy on top set to 'soft light' or 'overlay'.

I have written down a blog post with the exact details of how I achieve these effects.

Okay, now for the other two questions:

Q.1: You are quite right that the halo around the mountains was an artificial collateral of trying to increase the contrast of the sky.

Q.2: The 'fog' at the base was also brought out using the technique I mentioned along with some photo filters adjustment (again, I use it only on localized region on copied layers, then make it visible with soft brushes on masks). This often causes a difference between the lighting conditions of various objects (here the sky is cool, the mountains look warm) that can be picked up by careful eyes such as yours, and which my short foray into post-processing doesn't yet allow me to remedy.

Answer 2

I live in Colorado, and have lived in Kansas, Nebraska, and Utah, and I've seen the world look like this on numerous occasions, and it is positively beautiful. I know the photo in question has effects applied, but there is a natural condition which can lead to the scene looking like this. It's pretty simple - the sun is low in the sky, and it's shining partly under the clouds, lighting up the area under the clouds very brightly. Happens in Kansas all the time when there's fast-moving thunderstorms in the evening. People say Kansas is flat and boring, but the flat land allows for some really incredible sunsets and weather effects. Most of the time, I don't even stop to take a picture when I see this, but if it can win photography contests, maybe I should. It happens fairly often - at least a few times a year, and this is the good time of year for it too, when we get a lot of storms. If they line up against the mountains just right, you get this halo effect.

Answer 3

Here is the text of the contest entry:

Mountains on the Horizon

In 2011 I went backpacking in the middle of my undergrad on a shoestring budget around Europe, mostly by train and foot.

In the middle of a long and sweaty (it was warm even for an Indian) hike through the beautiful Hellbrunner Strasse in Salzburg, Austria, Mt. Untersberg appeared through the trees as an excellent allibi to stop, photograph, and catch my straining breath.

Canon EOS 500D (18-55mm). The exposure was later balanced, mixed and composited in Photoshop from a single JPEG.

Click on the image or here for larger size and full EXIF.

The entry has been deleted from the contest thread, and you don't have enough reputation yet to see deleted. (I think we in the 10K club tend to forget that we can see things other people can't.)

Answer 4

Answering

• Where is there? Flat terrain abruptly followed by mountains is possible but unusual.

I was unable to identify the exact location - nowhere that I could see on the Hellbrunner Strasse seemed to provide a perfect match for the scene, but somewhere around the areas shown below seems likely. The red line shows the general line of the road and the oval is the massif formed from several mountains, one of which is Untersberg - which may lie slightly more in Germany than Austria.

Hellbrunner Strasse runs (as far as I can tell), with occasional changes to other names and then back again. from about the southern point shown, north into Strasburg proper. Other more northerly locations seem less likely due to an increase in buildings and general reduction on open landscape.

Gargoyle maps provides

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Musings:

Note: I liked the picture when I first saw it and I like it now, and it sounds like there was not a vast amount of manipulation involved. My comments below do not relate negatively to what has been done to create this image:

The questions are all legitimate, but, adding to my recent reflections on submitted photos, makes me wonder why it matters. This forum, like many others, seems to be open to unspecified and unlimited amounts of manipulation. As long as a camera was involved in generating the base source material in some manner, or perhaps most or some of it, almost anything goes. Apparently.

Some major competitions which are open to the general public very specifically place no limitations at all on what can be done "artistically" to a 'photo' entry, and judges often choose entries which, thankfully enough, no camera could ever have created in this version of reality. Art in any form is fine enough in its rightful place (which in some cases is far far far away :-) ) but it seems a shame (to me) that the art form has in many cases come to require more graphic arts than light-through-a-piece-of-glass skills.

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Where do you draw the line ?

Apart from, 'Nowhere at all. If it feels, good do it.'?

3 examples done for my own purposes.
No great editing skills claimed or displayed.
Editing aim is to remove or alter content which was not relevant to or distracted from main theme.
Not aimed at competitions or display etc (except for friends).

No, I didn't ADD the rail. Swap A & B :-). Old man in Hong Kong. Posed only to the extent that I saw the photo coming and wited while he slowly shuffled into position. I have a few before and after, but this was the one I anted. The rail was portable but not movable by me in circumstances. It had to go. No?

Qingdao chess. At some other time the car and clothes would not have been there. The yellow pipe and valve would still have been :-(. Still a piece of clothes line left behind :-).

Yogyakarta labourer. Iron abs. Bare feet & steel pedal shafts! Axe, sickle, helmet, ... Wow. The motorcycle and red machinery in background were a sad distraction. Olin?

Answer 5

You can see that a lot of dodge/burn was used on the image. Also probably a lot of clone/stamp to move around unwanted objects, as the author explained in the text postead earlier.