The Skylift in Fog

We were at Loen in August, and it rained for three of the four days. Low cloud, fog sitting in the valley, the tops gone entirely. You can wait that out or you can go up into it, so we went up into it — the Skylift runs whether or not there is anything to see from the top, and there is something worth doing up there even in weather: standing where you can look across at the piece of mountain that Odin's horse is said to have taken out of the side, and thinking about how far down it went.

This frame is from the bottom, looking up at where we were about to go.

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What the raw file shows. A third of the frame is fog with nothing in it — the histogram puts 33.3% of the picture against the right wall before anything has been done to it. That part is fine; the fog is the subject and the subject is featureless. The problem is the bottom left. The forest is green, wet summer green under flat light, and in colour it takes over the photograph. Everything I wanted — the station hanging off the edge, the pylon half-swallowed, the cables running out into nothing — sits in the grey half, and the green half kept pulling the eye away from all of it. Colour wasn't adding anything here. It was competing.

So: black and white, decided before any slider moved. Not as a look — as a subtraction.

The first pass. Smart Develop, which is how I approach nearly every frame in PD, and then Auto B&W. It landed −0.33 exposure, contrast +12, highlights −26, shadows +37, whites +2, blacks −3, and a mixer under it. That is a good read of this file: pull the fog back, open the trees, don't touch much else. Ten seconds in and the photograph was already close to what I'd been standing there seeing.

Looking for the look. With that on the frame I opened the Preset Manager and let the Suggested view read it. It called the photograph landscape · backlit, which for a wall of fog is exactly right — the fog is the light source, lit from behind and above — and offered nine: Contrast Mask, False Color, Highlight Texture, Atmosphere, Three-Strip, Continental, Ektar 100, Full Scale, IR 720nm.

Two of those stuck. Full Scale, from Seven Studies, went on as the baseline — it is the full-range black and white in that pack, the one that doesn't editorialise, and on a frame whose whole content is a long grey ramp from wet bark to blank fog that is the correct choice. Then Highlight Texture from Printing Bench, which is a mask, not a look: it goes after the brightest band and asks for detail back out of it. On this photograph the brightest band is the fog. It composes with anything, which is why it can sit on top of Full Scale without eating it.

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The top end. Curve ▸ Lights +18 from Full Scale, and Tone EQ ▸ Highlights −13 on top. Those two work against each other on purpose: the curve opens the upper midtones so the rock face and the wet trees have somewhere to go, and the Tone EQ holds the very top so the fog stays fog instead of turning into paper. This is the one place I went back and forth.

Colour. Temperature 5659 K and Vibrance +33 — which looks like a strange thing to find in a photograph with no colour in it. Both sit upstream of the conversion: the white balance decides the channel ratios the mixer then weights, and the mixer weights by how much colour a pixel actually has, so raising vibrance gives it more to work with. Warming the file slightly and pushing the colour up is a way of asking for more separation out of the greys, not a leftover from an edit that changed its mind.

A split-tone. Shadows at hue 30, saturation 8; highlights at hue 220, saturation 5; blending 60. Warm dark, cool light, at strengths you'd have to be looking for. On a black-and-white conversion the grade lands after the conversion, so it tones the greys rather than shifting colours before they're greys — a genuine split-tone.

Detail, and the trade. Sharpening 18 with masking 17 — modest. ISO 200 out of an OM-1 in flat light has nothing to clean up, so there is no noise reduction in this edit at all. Then Grain 5 at size 15, from Full Scale: barely there, and there to stop the fog from going digitally smooth.

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The whole edit, as numbers. Read straight out of the edit as a preset, rounded to whole numbers.

Light

Contrast	6
Highlights	-10

Curve

Lights

18

Tone EQ

Highlights

-13

Color

Temperature (K)	5659
Vibrance	33

Grade

Color grade blending	60
Color grade highlight hue	220
Color grade highlight saturation	5
Color grade shadow hue	30
Color grade shadow saturation	8

B&W

Blue	-6
Convert to B&W	on
Green	8
Orange	10
Red	8
Yellow	12

Presence

Texture

18

Detail

Sharpening amount	18
Sharpening masking	17

Effects

Grain	5
Grain size	15

Local

Masked adjustments

1 mask(s)

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What I didn't do. On the fog itself: A third of this picture arrived clipped and stayed clipped; there is no detail hiding in it to recover, and Highlight Texture is working the band just below the blank rather than the blank itself. If I'd wanted structure in that upper third I needed to have found it at 1/1000s on the mountain, not at the desk. The edit can hold the fog. It can't invent what the fog was hiding.

The sidecar next to the ORF holds the whole development in plain text; the file the camera wrote is untouched. From here the photograph goes back to Photo Archive with the rest of the Loen frames, and then to the private group in Digg Photos. I want one or two from that week on the wall, and I suspect fog prints better than it screenshots.

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