The pinnacles at Pinnacles National Monument are the worn remnants of an ancient volcanic crater. This time of year there is greenery from winter rains to compliment the warm tones of the rock. In a few months, summer heat will dry the landscape and make walking the trails an altogether different experience. For now, cool temperatures and bright colors are made for the photographer.

A larger version of the image is here

This is a spliced panorama, made in Photoshop™ from two images stacked vertically. The two original frames show a significant difference in exposure:

The images were taken with the equivalent of a 28mm lens (on a Nikon D80). If a much wider angle had been used to get the whole scene on a single frame, the upper portion would have been too far overexposed to recover. As it is, I had to darken the lower frame before splicing. That’s easy to do by opening both images in Photoshop and adjusting the levels in the trail scene to reasonably match the greenery in the rocks. The stitching then completes the exposure blending.

Further up Moses Creek Trail we came upon a moss and lichen scene with another exposure challenge.

Yes, it is another vertical spliced panorama, enlarged here This time the change of focus between the two frames helped preserve the overall sharpness of the final product. The small patch of sky was way overexposed and distracted from the bright colors of the image. Attempting to darken pure white has no effect. Instead, I selected the whole sky region and filled it with a transparent blue tint.

It’s not easy to select all the small regions of white defined inside the branches, so instead I selected the expanse of sky and manually added the branches with the lasso tool. Filling with a 20%-opaque blue covers both the dark branches and white sky. This lightens the branches while darkening the sky, but I think it is acceptable.

A more accurate approach to darkening the sky would be to threshold the scene to isolate the sky, make a mask, and then use the mask to stencil in the sky color. But is that really quick? This is the quickshotartist blog, after all.

The overall scene exposure is set to be dark to keep the colors rich.