Photo Editing/Post-Processing - Before and After

[TrekRover]

My photography 2023 new year resolution is to become better at post-processing. I thought it would be fun to start a post and see if anyone is interested in sharing their edits of their before and after photos and talk a bit about their thought process and how they approached it.

P.S. Feel free to leave me feedback on how I can improve either when taking the photo or post-processing! This is definitely one of my poorer shots lol.

Here is my example:

Subject: View of Mount Ararat in Turkey from Armenia

Timeframe: July 12, 2022

Temperature: 104 F (40C)

Camera: Sony a7RIV

Lens: FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM OSS II

Aperture: f/2.8

Focal Length: 70mm

ISO: 100

My Thoughts:

I honestly thought this photo was a lost cause. The intense heat in the summer caused a dusty fog to cover the mountains to where its barely visible. However, since it took me around 28 hours to get there, I had to take the shot. Thank goodness Sony ARW raw format stores so much information to help salvage the photo from the difficult weather conditions.

Prior to this photo, I actually never had to use the Dehaze attribute feature in Lightroom Classic, so it was a great learning experience for me to try Dehaze for the first time. Dehaze worked like a charm and mostly removed all the haze. However it did leave quite a bit of fuzziness and blur around the outline of the mountain and made the overall photo darker in general. I would have liked to spend more time trying to clear up the fuzz and mountain outline. However only had some time to just add some Texture and Clarity points to try to bring out the details of the mountains more.