When it’s near 100 degrees outside and your house doesn’t have air-conditioning the last thing you want to do is sit around in a “warm” room feeling like your life is being sucked out of you minute by minute. Hanging out in the cool car with music playing and the beautiful Oregon Coast scenery in the background was just what we needed to escape the unbearable heat that the Pacific Northwest has endured for the past couple of weeks. The coast was a bit cooler than we had expected but a very welcomed break from the heat.

Stylization

I really liked the way this image looked when I imported it into Lightroom with the exception of how dark it was. It also wasn’t quite as dreamy as I’d remembered it when I was capturing the scene so I took it into Perfect Photo Suite 9.5 to make it match my vision.

I started out by taking the image into Perfect Photo Suite 9.5 Layers to work on cleaning it up a bit. After removing the spots and most of the sun flare I converted the layer to a Smart Layer so the changes I made could be saved in a way that would allow me to make updates in Perfect Effects later if I so desired.

I started by lighting the rocks in the foreground. Then I added some soft dynamic contrast, Sunshine, and a light gradient to the foreground to brighten it up.

I then added some supplementary clouds to the sky with a lens blur to give the image the look I was trying to achieve. The updated sky ended up with a bit more color than I wanted so I applied a reduce color filter with a gradient mask to the top part of the image. I decided that I’d like a bit more detail in the rocks so I applied a bit more dynamic contrast as a final touch. Once I was satisfied with the image, I saved my changes and the image file was ready to view back in Adobe Lightroom.

Gear & Setup

Body: Fujifilm X-T1
Lens: Fujifilm 16-55 f/2.8
Exposure Time: 2.6
F-Stop: 16
White Balance: Auto
Filters: Lee Big Stopper
Tripod: Yes