Badlands

Canon EOS 10D, 17mm (17-40), 1/250, f/10, ISO 100, retouched

Here’s a photo I took in the South Dakota Badlands a couple of years ago. Or to be more precise, the image above is the Photoshop-retouched version of the photo.

This is what it looked like straight out of the camera:

The most glaring problems are the smudges clearly visible in the sky (always remember to clean your lens with a lens cloth before and after shooting, especially outdoors). Back in the film days, they would have been a real challenge to remove. Now Photoshop’s spot healing tool makes quick work of blemishes like this.

And here’s a funny story: the spot healing tool instantly zapped away all but one of the lens spots. But the last one stubbornly refused to disappear. I changed every setting I could think of, and still no luck. Then a slip of the mouse shifted the photo, but the spot didn’t shift with it. So I’d spent ten minutes trying to erase a smudge on my monitor. Photoshop is useful for a great many things, but it won’t clean your screen for you.

Back to the photo. You’ll also notice that the unedited version is ever so slightly tilted. A guide line across the horizon makes it easy to rotate and crop the photo into perfect alignment.

Finally, a quick level adjustment cleans up the dingy colors and makes the picture “pop.”