Pigeon Point Lighthouse

Posted by Joerg Rockenberger on Sun Jun 15, 2014 2:34 pm

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Pigeon Point Lighthouse, Pescadero, CA, USA, at dusk. Hope you enjoy. Best, Joerg

Canon 5D MkIII, 70-200 F4L, 100 mm, 150 sec, F11, ISO 100, Manual Exposure, Gitzo tripod, Giotto Ballhead

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by Gary Briney on Sun Jun 15, 2014 5:58 pm

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The lighthouse looks great against the sunset, though there seems to be a slight halo around it.

G. Briney

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by Joerg Rockenberger on Wed Jun 18, 2014 5:38 pm

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Gary Briney wrote:The lighthouse looks great against the sunset, though there seems to be a slight halo around it.

Thanks Gary. Yeah, that halo has been bugging me for awhile in this image. Though it's much worse in the web-sized version than in my master file. There is actually a bright outline around the lighthouse already in the raw file without any edits. Perhaps the lighthouse acts as a gravitational lens?

Anyway, correcting for chromatic aberration in ACR makes this outline worse and subsequent processing is not helping... Not sure what to do about it.

Best, Joerg

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by Gary Briney on Wed Jun 18, 2014 10:40 pm

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Thanks for the additional information Joerg --- I'm guessing that the halo is somehow related to anti-aliasing.

G. Briney

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by E.J. Peiker on Wed Jun 18, 2014 11:12 pm

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The sky also gets darker just before the halo. This is likely a combination of some of the sliders in the RAW processor as well as sharpening. It can happen at ultra high contrast edges like this and the best thing you can do is to select them and get rid of them via any number of methods, all manual.

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by Gary Briney on Thu Jun 19, 2014 4:44 am

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@E.J. - Thanks much for taking a look and confirming that there's no simple 'fix' --- high contrast horizontal edges along the shore also show a halo.

@Joerg - I would be tempted to carefully use PS at a 100% scale or higher magnification and run the clone stamp tool parallel to the affected edges with a very small brush (2 pixels). If you have a steady hand that would probably be faster than working out a selection solution, since making a selection one to two pixels wide can be problematic along the anti-aliased angled lighthouse edge.

G. Briney

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by Joerg Rockenberger on Thu Jun 19, 2014 5:01 pm

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Thanks E.J. & Gary for taking the time to comment! Based on your feedback I went back and realized that I had applied a GND filter in ACR to darken down and increase the saturation in the sky. That seemed to contribute to the halo...

I then generated two CR2 files - both without the GND filter and one with an overall negative exposure adjustment - and blended both in PS using a gradient layer mask. I also did NOT apply a USM filter in the resulting image posted here. The colors are a bit different - and I didn't bother to clean up the image or to crop it - but I think it's better. No?

Thanks, Joerg