In my post last week, I wrote about a trip I made about a month ago to the Isabella Jo Trail near the Big Dam Bridge. While walking along the path, I discovered and photographed some sand patterns. With my eyes, I could clearly see the incredible patterns, and I was excited to see what I could create when I processed them. When I got home and opened the files on my computer, everything looked very flat as expected, but there was nothing a little processing couldn’t take care of. Or, so I thought.
The patterns that I had photographed seemed to have disappeared into thin air. No matter what I tried, nothing was really working to bring them out like I had seen them. Failure was followed by failure, and I finally decided there wasn’t much I could do but relegate the files to the dark corners of my hard drive never to see the light of day.
But, I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I would occasionally reopen them to see if something would come to mind, but nothing did.
Then, one day, an idea struck me like a bolt of lightning. What would happen if I combined the three images into a triptych? I had done one before, and I thought it had turned out well. I had nothing to lose by trying it, so why not give it a go?
But, that didn’t solve the underlying problem: How do I process the images to emphasize the patterns? I had tried everything I could think of, and nothing had worked. I felt like I was at a bit of an impasse. Finally, I did the one thing I hadn’t done and something I never do: in Lightroom’s Develop module, I clicked the “Auto” button. To my surprise, the result was quite satisfactory.
While the automatic settings worked well, I still needed to make a few adjustments to them. First, I reduced the texture of the files to reduce their “grittiness;” they were images of sand, after all. I applied some additional clarity along with a little dehazing, which actually helped to further emphasize the patterns. I lowered the color temperature slightly and adjusted the vibrance and saturation to remove much of the orange tint that was present. Finally, I added some contrast to bring out the patterns a little more.
Once that was done, I then opened the images in Photoshop, arranged them in the order I wanted, and created the triptych.