Visiting Lake Braies is always beautiful, since I’ve been here other times, on my last visit I wanted to see it in winter. Usually in winter the frozen lakes lose part of their fascination, especially due to the absence of reflections, but in my opinion they gain on the colors and the pov where it is possible to take some pictures and Braies is one of the best on this
I found a very interesting point under the famous pier overlooking the mountain, under the snow could not settle and so remained only the ice, here the view towards the mountain in the background was perfect and the ice with all its variations did the rest
Photo aside this pov was definitely very uncomfortable, I had to shoot quickly because the place was very slippery and my tripod keep slipping away 🙂
I captured the images with two different focus points for focus stacking in order to obtain a unique focused picture of lake Braies
WORKFLOW EXPLANATION
As I mentioned above, I captured all my bracketing exposures first focusing on the ice below and then focusing to the mountain. Once at the computer I uploaded all the photos between them and started this process to have 3 final images focused near and to infinite
At this point I started using my TTS PRO panel, to make a digital blending between images using auto blend functions. I started removing some people in the scene with clone stamp tool, than I raised the detail levels and adjusted the contrast with the luminosity masks
I used the dodge and burn to give more impact to the bubbles below, then adjusted the colors by increasing the purple and applying a colder filter to the frame. With the glow tool I adjusted the light intensity of the sky and lightened some points of the photo.
Finally I launched a slight orton effect and created a vignette effect to emphasize the central scene
As always I hope you will find this usefull. I love to ear this from you!
TECNHNICAL STUFF
Camera: Nikon D-800
Lens: Nikon 14-24mm f/2,8
Three Exposures Focus Stacked (-1; 0; +1;)
ISO: 50 at f/6,3
Software: Photoshop CC2019
Plugin: TTS Pro
