Enhancing a landscape

I am just learning how to improve photographic images. Here is one of my favorite efforts.

I created a panorama of Pilot Mountain in North Carolina from several digital camera images stitched using Panorama Factory. The result is below. You can see that this image suffers from several problems: the trees in the foreground are quite underexposed, and the heavy haze robs much of the image color and detail that would be present on a better day.

Contrast this with the following version, which resulted from manipulation in Paint Shop Pro beta 7.

I like this image much better.

The image was created from the first as follows:

• I created duplicate layer, so that I would retain an unmodified original as layer 1.
• I applied an unsharp mask radius 3.0, strength 60%, clipping 11 to the duplicate layer.
• I applied a "Clarify" to reduce the haze. I have no idea why this works so well.
• I added a small gamma correction to brighten the foreground trees.
• I created a new raster layer, consisting of a downward gradient fill from black to white. I changed the blend mode to overlap, and set the transparency of the layer to 35%. This seemed to darken the blue skies while bringing out even more detail in the foreground trees. I lightened the new layer slightly in the region of the peak.
• I added a Hue/Saturation/Brightness adjustment layer, and increased saturation very slightly ( +3). This seemed to have the most effect on the brightly illuminated section of land just left of center.

After this, I did a resize (smaller) and sharpen to generate the web images. You can download a copy of Paint Shop Pro from the Jasc web site.

• Miscellaneous tips and info
• Rick Matthews' home page
• Department of Physics

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