One of my favorite places to travel is the Great Smoky Mountains. Everywhere you look, there is something incredible to photograph. Do you enjoy capturing grand landscapes? You can do that. Prefer the small intimate details of nature? They are there. How about wildlife or wildflower photography? Got it. No matter what your preferred nature photography subject, the Smokies pretty much has it covered.
Going through my photo archive the other day, I re-discovered this image from my last trip to the Smokies in 2014.
It was a late evening, and the sun was getting low on the horizon creating fantastic lighting. My wife and I were on our way to Clingmans Dome when we noticed this amazing view. We stopped at the first pullout we came upon to take in this incredible view of the tree covered mountains and beautiful cloud formations before us. It didn’t take very long before the camera came out and the shutter button started getting pressed!
When I originally processed the file, I wasn’t impressed with the final result. It was nice, but it just didn’t do the scene justice. Eventually, using the plug-in Simplify from Topaz Labs, I converted the photo to a water color. The result (which you can see here) reminded me of something Bob Ross might paint, and I was quite pleased with how it turned out.
But, when I saw the original RAW file again, I began to wonder what it might look like in black and white. So, I began to play around with the picture once again.
The first thing I did was, in Lightroom, create virtual copy of the original file so I didn’t lose all the work I had done on it. Working on the copy, I converted the image to black and white. The conversion reduced the contrast considerably making the picture look very flat and one-dimensional, so I spent time increasing contrast in order to provide separation in the various tonal values. I then ran the file through Topaz Labs’ Sharpen AI to enhance the sharpness of the image.
Once the image sharpening was complete, I opened the Camera Raw filter in Photoshop and applied a slight vignette to darken the corners of the photograph.
In addition to enhancing sharpness, the Sharpen AI program also removes digital noise. Normally, I don’t like to have much, if any, noise in my final pictures, so this isn’t a concern. However, when I think of black and white photos, I usually think of old photographs that had a degree of visible grain in them. So, my final adjustment to the photo was to use the Camera Raw filter to add some digital grain to give it the look and feel of an old black and white picture.