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Sailing east to west from the Mediterranean sea out into the Atlantic Ocean takes you through the Straits of Gibraltar, which is were Liz and I were to be found towards the end of our cruise aboard the P&O liner Arcadia.
The straits are only seven miles across at their narrowest point, which gives a great view of the Atlas Mountains to the south, and the rock of Gibraltar to the north.
The rock has an instantly recogniseable double hump shape from this angle, and I was determined to get a good photo of it as we sailed past.
The only fly in my ointment was the haze. A combination of high pressure and a blustery breeze meant the that air was full of spray mist that, over the distance between our ship and the rock, cut contrast and colour saturation considerably.
When faced with a situation like this my first recourse is to reach for my trusty polarizing filter, which goes a long way to mitigating the effect of the haze, restoring some of the contrast and saturation lost to the airborne particles.
If more restoration is needed, as was the case here, then there are a few Photoshop tricks I employ.
First of all I'll duplicate the original layer and set the blend mode to 'multiply'. This gives a massive boost to both saturation and contrast, an effect that usually requires dialling back through the use of the layer opacity slider.
Next I'll produce a new layer that's a visual blend of the two previous (cntrl+alt+shift+n+e) and apply a local contrast boost using the USM sharpening filter set to radius=50 and strength=20.
Following that comes another sharpening layer, this time based on the high pass filter with radius=3 and blend mode set to 'overlay'.
Next I'll use a levels adjustment layer to set the images black and white points, and adjust the gamma if necessary.
Finally I'll use an HSL adjustment layer to boost the saturation, but only if required, as the previous steps will have already increased the saturation as a by-product of their main actions.
A lot of effort to go to you might think, but it certainly makes a difference to the viewer's experience when you do so.
Filename - gibraltar 02.jpg
Camera - Canon 5D
Lens - 100-400mm zoom @ 180mm
Exposure - 1/250sec @ f5.6, ISO400
Location - Gibralta
This image - 800x450px JPEG
Conversion - ACR & PS-CS2
Comments - Polarising filter used to reduce haze.
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