This shot is, of course, all about atmosphere. We were on the King Ranch in South Texas. I was one of the leaders on a birding fieldtrip. We went out onto a section of open grazing lands in search of Spraigs Pipit and grassland Sparrows. It was not long after dawn and the sun, still behind the bank of clouds, was drawing water…which is the highly descriptive term for those streaks in the air. I always try to capture it when I see it,  and here it had the sweep of grassland an the line of greenwood along the stream in the distance to set it off. Who could resist?

From a technical standpoint this is a complex image. The drawing water effect is not easy to catch. I started with a 3 exposure in-camera HDR using the Samsung Smart Camera WB800F in Rich Tone mode. The image was better than a standard shot of this very high range scene would have been,  but still did not catch the atmosphere. After transferring the image to my Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 I processed it in Snapseed using the HDR Scene filter and a combination of Ambiance and Shadow in Tune Image, along with some Sharpen and Structure in Details. That brought it closer but still…

I had some time on a flight from Newark to Denver yesterday so I opened the image again in Photo Editor, a very capable image processor for Android that few seem to know about (the lame name does not help:-). Photo Editor allows you to apply color effects…brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, temperature, etc…to the whole scene or to any shape drawn on the scene…or you can brush the effect on just where you want it. The brush is particularly effective with the Note’s stylus. I used a shape to adjust the color balance of the grasses, which were too blue in the original, and then various brushes to adjust saturation and contrast in the belt of trees. I also used a Clone brush to treat an area of the clouds right in front of the sun which had completely burned out even with the HDR treatment. Then I applied some local area contrast (fine detail enhansement) using the Unsharp Mask tool on just the grasses.  Finally I applied a some light noise reduction to the whole image. (I told you, Photo Editor is amazing.)

It is still not a perfect image,  but it comes close to catching the drawing water effect…and it was fun!