Patrick’s Point is on the north coast of California, roughly 75 miles south of the Oregon border. This is in a land of stunning scenery. Wild rhododendrons grow among redwoods, and the forests top cliffs above the ocean beaches. Patrick’s Point State Park features Agate Trail, with dramatic vistas as it winds down to the ocean. As I learned, the problem with photographing the scenes is that the forest is dark and the ocean is bright. It takes some Photoshop adjustment to produce a good picture.

My standard approach is to make a spliced panorama with one frame of the sky and the other of the dark foreground. The automatic exposure darkens the sky in the first frame and lightens the ground in the second. The exposures in this case were so different it is hard to imagine they are from the same scene.

Notice that the left frame is slightly smaller than the right one. My Nikon P6000 has a lens with barrel distortion, so frames having the horizon must be corrected using the Correct Camera Distortion filter in Photoshop™. Putting in 3 units of pincushion makes the correction, after which the frame must be cropped. The camers has an option to correct the distortion when the picture is taken, but it’s buried in some menu and resets whenever the camera is such off. It’s less trouble to do it in Photoshop. If the correction is not made, the horizon is bowed slightly upwards.

The next step is to darken the foreground image to roughly match the foliage in the sky frame. An adjustment to show shadow detail restores much of the advantage of having taken a longer exposure. If I had matched the exposures in the original, there would be no shadow detail to recover. I also cropped the foreground image to eliminate all the sky. That keeps the sky blue.

Splicing yields:

This is in the ballpark, but the foreground is not tied to the distant scene. It’s as if the foreground came from a different scene. Looking at the foreground frame, there are two areas of interest.

At (1) the bright highlights of the foliage were lost in the splicing. The photomerge process averaged the bright foreground highlights with the black shadows of the sky frame. I outline the highlight area with the lasso tool, feathered the edges, and pasted the bright highlights back into the merged panorama. With the pasted area approximately in the right place, I set the transparency of the layer to 70%. That allows enough of the underlying image to be visible to perfect the alignment, and at the same time it dims the highlights slightly to help hide the paste.

In (2), some of the foliage highlights were so overexposed that they recorded as white. It’s distracting to have foliage as white as surf. The Brightness control in Photoshop always leaves pure white as white, while darkening shades short of pure white. That is no help. Instead I used the eyedropper tool to set the foreground color to a shade of green from a well-exposed leave on the lower left of the image. Then I roughly lassoed the areas of overexposed highlights, feathered the selection, and filled it with the green foreground color. I set the fill to 12% opacity, so it would just tint the highlights green. I thought it needed more tint, so I repeated the fill with another 12%. It’s better to use small steps to judge the effect.

The final image is reasonably well tied together. I trimmed some of the bottom edge to improve the composition.

The sky frame by itself is not a bad photo. Including the foreground increases the apparent depth of the image and gives a better indication of the character of the forest.