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We end this month in New Zealand with a sense of achievement: we walked the Tongariro Crossing without significant pain nor injury. We had good weather and got some great photos of the beautiful volcanic landscape. Our 18.6 km walk began early morning in the shadow of Mt. Doom, as Ngauruhoe is now popularly known following its role in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. In the bright sunlight at altitude, capturing well-exposed images of the dark landscape required extra care to avoid blown highlights.

Click thumbnail to enlarge image

Mt. Ngauruhoe (a.k.a Mt. Doom)

Getting good exposure

I have the AE-L/AF-L button on my Nikon D70 set to AE Lock only, meaning exposure locks while the button is pressed but focus is unaffected. The default locks both exposure and focus:

AE-L/AF-L settings (© Nikon)

I've ignored this button until recently, perhaps because using it requires some dexterity and coordination:

1. Zoom in and focus on a highlight—usually horizon sky (half-depress the trigger);
2. Depress the AE-L/AF-L button;
3. Keeping my thumb on the AE-L/AF-L button, release the trigger;
4. Zoom in on the subject and half-depress the trigger to lock focus;
5. Zoom out and recompose;
6. Press the trigger;
7. Release the AE-L/AF-L button!

Fingers and thumbs (© Nikon)

I recently tried this routine repeatedly on the Crossing and it soon became automatic, but granted it does seem cumbersome. Is there a better way to do this?

After taking the shot I always check for over-exposed areas on the LCD, which I keep on Highlights display (the brightest areas flash; the less the better).

Raw material

The idea is to get the raw image into Photoshop without seeing the telltale red overlay that indicates potential blown highlights (or too much blue, indicating under-exposure):

Raw image before adjustment in Photoshop CS3

This should mean that nothing fancy is required during raw conversion to ensure that highlights are retained and the darker tones are not too dark:

Raw image after adjustment in Photoshop CS3

Photoshop action

I've given up treating each image individually in Photoshop from start to finish; it takes way too much time. Most of that time is spent doing the same things, using the same numbers. My current workflow thus takes shortcuts:

1. Import images from the CF card into iPhoto and make an initial selection;
2. Open 6 raw files at once in Photoshop's Adobe Camera Raw interface;
3. Adjust each image individually (typically using just the B and L tabs in CS3);
4. For every open image adjust levels, use the healing brush as required, fix rotation, crop etc.;
5. Batch-process all 6 open images via a custom Photoshop action (File > Automate > Batch in CS3);
6. Repeat 2–5.

Running a custom action on multiple open images

So what does this custom script do? Several things:

Anatomy of a custom action

Based on the settings described in my earlier workflow post, the action runs through:

• Noise reduction (colour noise 65%; sharpen 0%; strength 7; preserve details 45);
• Smart sharpening (amount 30%; radius 1 px; remove lens blur);
• Conversion from ProPhoto to Adobe RGB (1998) colour space;
• Conversion from 16 bit to 8 bit mode;
• Saving to the OS X Desktop as maximum quality (12) JPEG.

If you'd like to try it, you can download this action here.

Having deleted the raw images from iPhoto, I then re-import the JPEG keepers. So, that's how I do it. How do you do things and what can you suggest to improve my results?

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