Landscape Painted Hills

[Dean Wilson]

Sadly, three separate trips and nothing but clear blue skies. (10-shot horizontal panorama). I really need to shoot C-RAW for stitching more than 10 photos!

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[SwampGrizz]

Allow me to display my ignorance. Why does shooting in C-RAW allow you to shoot more than 10 panoramic shots? (Or stitch them together?)

 

[Dean Wilson]

Allow me to display my ignorance. Why does shooting in C-RAW allow you to shoot more than 10 panoramic shots? (Or stitch them together?)

File size. When the files are 58 MB and you have 10-20 images, the processing can tax even the best of machines.

 

[SwampGrizz]

Ohhhhh…file size. That makes sense.
I shoot mostly C-RAW now except when it’s family snapshots, etc. that I’m not going to edit. I shoot JPG then. I really can’t tell any difference between C-RAW and RAW, quality wise.

 

[THXGEEK]

Beautiful picture!

File size. When the files are 58 MB and you have 10-20 images, the processing can tax even the best of machines.

Yah, I spend alot of time on file management to keep things from getting out of control... Also, don't upgrade to a medium-format camera if you don't have the space. The raw files from my Fuji average about 203MB each!

What GPU are you running? I upgraded to a GeForce RTX 5090 and it made a big difference. Expensive as hell, but since I spend alot of time in post-processing, for me it's worth it.

 

[Dean Wilson]

Basic specs are:

Chip: AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370
Memory: 32GB LPDDR5X
Drive(s): 2x2TB SSD
GPU: GeForce RTX 4060

 

[ACEkin]

Quite a vista! For some reason, my eyes are looking for a little more midtone contrast, especially on the bright hills. This idea, of course, is without seeing the actual scenery and may well be misplaced.

 

[Dean Wilson]

Quite a vista! For some reason, my eyes are looking for a little more midtone contrast, especially on the bright hills. This idea, of course, is without seeing the actual scenery and may well be misplaced.

Here is ChatGBT's version on improving midtone.

 

[ACEkin]

Dean, thank you for trying it out. The question is, how does it look to you? There are simple Photoshop ways of improving that as well. I will be glad to share them here if you like. They can be applied to the full-size image. That is, if the new version speaks to you as a person who was there and took the photograph.

 

[Dean Wilson]

Dean, thank you for trying it out. The question is, how does it look to you? There are simple Photoshop ways of improving that as well. I will be glad to share them here if you like. They can be applied to the full-size image. That is, if the new version speaks to you as a person who was there and took the photograph.

Sure! I'm willing to learn editing. Thank you my Friend.

 

[ACEkin]

Sure! I'm willing to learn editing. Thank you my Friend.

For this image, the simplest way to boost overall or selective contrast/midtone contrast in Photoshop:

1. If it is the base layer, press Ctrl-J to duplicate it
2. Change Blending Mode to Soft light, or Overlay
3. This may result in too much contrast
4. The easiest step to control it is to change the Opacity from 100% down
5. Alternatively:
6. Apply Filters/Other/Highpass, and adjust the radius to what may appear to be a large number. For this size image, I would probably use a radius of 60-80. For full-size images, it can go 150-200 while you observe the contrast increase.
7. This will increase the contrast in the full range. To tame it down, use the Blend if sliders (access them by double-clicking on the layer thumbnail) and raise the shadows to around 70, highlights to around 180, and then split the control point at both ends by holding the Alt key while pulling half the triangle to the right or left, depending on which side you are clicking on. Splitting the triangular high and low end sliders will make a smoother transition. Creating a 10-point gap generally does the job.
8. You can see the shadow and highlight contrast go down, and the midtone contrast increase.

There are variations of this depending on the image. Changing the blend mode to other options can dramatically increase the contrast. The goal is to observe the border of "credible" midtone contrast increase.

I hope this process does the job for you. There are tools in Lightroom as well, but Photoshop has more finesse in this kind of adjustment.