View of Pale di San Martino from the small lake located near the refuge, during my days in the mountains I often found cloudy days and very uncertain weather that in a certain respect created the conditions for good photos even outside the canonical golden and blue hours. To make this photo I benefited from the cloudy sky for a diffused light, I made a focus blending between the elements of the photo when the location began to empty from the hikers

It was the first time I came here and I found the excursion to Pale San Martino and Baita Segantini one of the easiest to do ever. The path is literally leveled to allow, in addition to the ascent of the people, also the ascent by shuttles that take you up in 5 minutes.

Very beautiful view and perfect organization, on the other hand there is excessive tourism, a destination that is too inflated also due to the ease of reaching




WORKFLOW EXPLANATION

I blended all the images using focus blending technique, since I bracketed all the shots captured, I used a long exposure image to blend the water into the  resulting focus blending image, in order to have a smoother water into the frame. I fixed color cast, corrected the perspective and added details using TTS Pro.

After this I dodge and burn the mountains and the foreground, I increased the blue tones of the image adding a blue filter to the highlights using luminosity masks, I sharpened some part of the foreground and I added a soft orton effect to the image. As final step I decreased a bit the whole luminosity of the image increasing the lights coming from the sky, with a brush I manually create a soft vignette to increase the sense of darkness out of the main subjects

I hope you will find this usefull. I like to ear this from you!


TECNHNICAL STUFF

Camera: Nikon D-850

Nikon 14-24 f/2,8 (used at 14mm)

Focus Stacking

ISO: 31 at f9

Software: Photoshop CC2022

Plugin: TTS Pro 2.0