The mountains here are part of the Alaska Range in the interior of Alaska, about 200 miles north of Anchorage, not far from Denali National Park. It's a truly beautiful area, with a mix of mountains, marshes, forests and meadows. I chose this spot because all of those appear! And I didn't even have to work hard, I just pulled of the highway onto the shoulder.

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Note added later: It looks as though I need to make some adjustments in Photoshop or to my monitor; this image looks far less saturated on TE than it does when viewed in Photoshop on my computer. See the workshop by John (jwmunro) for what I intended the image to look like!

Ken here is what I did:



1) In a Curves adjustment layer I moved the white point left to about 215 to spread the histogram from left to right. On the same curves layer I locked the midtones and adjusted the shadow quarter tone down 1 or 2 points and then adjusted the highlight quarter tone up a point or two.

2) A second Curves adjustment layer I adjusted the midtones to brighten the mountains and then adjusted the quarter tones a point or two.

3) I add a black mask to the second curves layer and selected a soft edge brush at about 50% opacity with a color of white. I then painted over the mountains until I got the desired affect. If the effect is too much paint with black or lower the layer opacity.

4) The sky is kind of featurless so I added a new layer with a soft light blending mode and 50% gray fill. Using the same brush a before but with the color black I then painted in some density to the sky.

5) Flatten and save as a jpg.



Hope you like the results.

Hi Ken. In Photoshop CS, I started by selecting from the horizon to the bottom of the frame and adjusting levels. I then selected inverse and did the same with the mountains and sky. Next I increased saturation slightly, and applied sharpening on another layer (opacity of about 70). Lastly I ran the image through Neat Image to minimize any visible noise. I hope you like it?

- Dan