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This sunrise was so awesome and I really hated myself for not bringing my DSLR on this trip, when I saw this sunrise. I shot this shot with a snapshot camera Canon S95, which is a pretty good snapshot camera, but it doesn’t even come close to a DSLR. This is the original photo:

As you can see the photo is not nearly as strong in the colors and the shadows are almost completely black. I shot this in JPEG, even though the Canon S95 actually does shoot RAW format. Never shoot JPEG, you just might end up regretting it, at some point, when you want to use the photo.

When I shot the photo I liked the speaker, but when I started post-processing it, I didn’t like it. I removed using a combination of clone stamp and healing brush. It takes a little time, to recreate the water and waves well enough, for the viewer not to notice.

To get the look and feel of the final image I used Lightroom with these settings:

 

Notice that I increased the Shadows to 100, and then on the tone curve I also increased the Darks and the Shadows again. If you have some really dark parts, you can use both sections to make the shadows brighter. However, you will get a lot of noise in there.

I shot this in JPEG and a JPEG almost does not have any information in the shadows, so I dialed the Contrast pretty high, to 95. This brought the shadows back to very dark, but increased the brighter parts – that’s what Contrast does. But it did give me a lot more structure and mood on the hills. You can now see the mist.

I then made the photo a lot more colorful by using both Vibrance and Saturation.

The last major thing I did to this photo, was to use Noise reduction. I used Noiseware from Imagenomic. I find that to be a great Noise reduction tool, because it is good at retaining details. The noise was quite bad in this photo, when I had made the look and feel in Lightroom, so I did a lot of work on the noise. The sky got more noise reduction than the hills. I used layer masks in Photoshop to blend a heavily noise reduced image with a less noise reduced image. If I just applied heavy noise reduction to all of the image, I would loose too many details.