It’s the start of a new year and I hope that it’s a great one for your photography. There are lots of New Year Resolution posts and emails doing the rounds so I won’t add to them. Instead, I want to share an image that I shot back in October 2019.

This shows the view from Higger Tor in the Peak District at sunset, back in October 2019. It’s shot using a Fuji XT3 and Fuji 10-24 lens at 10mm. The exposure is 1/3 second at f/14.0 and ISO160 and I used a 3 stop Reverse ND Graduate filter on the sky.

The reason that I’m showing the image now, is that I reprocessed it the other day and for the first time got the Colours looking the way that I wanted. Previously the yellows would come out too red and the blue would have a pink tint. This is the first time that I have been able to achieve what I call clean colours with this image.

Part of my problem was probably caused by a lot of smoke in the atmosphere. That’s why the cloud on the left is a little dark. The smoke was from a large moorland fire and was discolouring the sunset.

But there is another possible cause of the problem which is the colour handling in Photoshop. For some reason when I try to process the image using only Photoshop, whilst I can remove the colour cast, the colours appear off – the only way I can describe it is that they feel “synthetic” and false. This image however was processed using only Affinity Photo 2 and I’m rather pleased by the results. Even the RAW conversion looks great when I zoom into the detail and the colours are clean and natural.

So having said at the start that I won’t add another “New Years Resolution” post to your inbox, I will say that I’m making this my year to work more with Affinity Photo for processing landscape photography.

I hope you like the image and have a great weekend.

PS The January edition of my Lenscraft newsletter is out tomorrow. You can get it here https://lenscraft.co.uk/lenscraft-photography-blog/photography-newsletter/ if you aren’t already subscribed.