Brian,
wonderful shots,
Would you mind sharing the steps how you processed the "Storms at Sunrise"?
those clouds are stunning..
thanks
I appreciate the comment, and I don't mind sharing. I can't say how useful it will be, as these days my workflow makes quite a bit of use of Topaz plugins, and I wouldn't recall the settings within those. But in general terms:
1. Develop RAW in Lightroom, NR turned off, no sharpening; curves set to linear (I don't want to increase contrast at this stage, as it will be creatively enhanced later).
2. Bring into Photoshop.
3. New layer and Topaz Denoise (Denoise allows a lot of control over degree of NR, what areas are affected, detail & sharpness retention).
4. New layer and Topaz Clarity - Clarity allows fairly fine-tuned control over contrast enhancements, including what some people call "structure". With skies & clouds, particularly dark clouds, you have to be careful not to emhasize contrast enhancements to smaller detail, which makes clouds look overly grungy, unless of course,that's a look you're going for.
5. New layer and Topaz Adjust (used subtly, can't recall details though).
6. New Adjustment Layer (Levels) to increase black levels (darken a bit) to get more the look that I wanted, but which at the same time made the underside of the clouds too black, see next step.
7. Masking layer to hide the underside of the clouds, so those areas weren't affected by the levels layer above.
8. New layer and Topaz Detail 3 - Detail is a contrast-based sharpener that allows fine-tuned control over sharpening by areas of large, medium and small sized details, allowing detail enhancement without bringing out grunge or hashiness, if that's what you need, (It can also emphasize fine detail without changes to larger details.)
9. Add signature watermark.
10. Add black border, convert to sRGB, downsize & save as jpeg.
A few of the above steps involve various types of contrast enhancement, but I'm almost never trying to "get there" in one step, rather I'm layering changes in a small number of steps, knowing that my next step is also going to affect contrast. That's one reason why I almost never add contrast in LR; Panasonic RAW files are fairly flat in terms of contrast, which is perfect for detailed editing, and doesn't accentuate potential for noise out of the gate.
Before adding the watermark, my .PSD working file with layers intact is just under 558mb, fyi.
Hope this helps.
By the way, I see you're from the SF area. We stopped in San Francisco, so we went to Chinatown and found some good dim sum. That was a welcome change after many days of ships' cooking.
Brian