“A Silk Purse from a Sow’s Ear?” Is it possible?

I remember a few years ago driving out to the Trona Pinnacles which is located in the California Desert Conservation Area managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.  The Trona Pinnacles are the remains of tufa towers created in Pleistocene Ice-Age lakes that covered much of that part of California between 100,000 years and 10,000 years ago.  This otherworldly landscape is made up of calcium carbonate towers that formed underwater in the glacial Searles Lake.  Now these tufa towers jut up from the floor of the dry-lake bed near the small town of Trona, California.  Honestly, they look just like I imagine the Martian landscape could look like.

When I arrived at the site, the air was thick from the smoke from a massive wildfire in the southern Sierras, and the late-afternoon lighting conditions were weirdly muted and distinctly off-color.  Overall visibility was probably down to perhaps 10 miles, maybe less.  I really was very disappointed after a nearly 2.5 hour drive from my house to see if I could make some interesting landscape photographs here.  I figured that since I was there though I might as well make the best of it and see if I could still make an interesting photograph as well as recon the place for future visits.  I unpacked my gear and began to wander around with the camera on the tripod trying to get a feel for the pinnacles and the odd lighting conditions.

Here’s an example of what I encountered on-the-ground, with this Olympus raw format (ORF) image straight from my camera–

The Olympus Camera Raw image with no processing.

As you can see the image is flat, lacks color and contrast, has muted lighting conditions, and just generally isn’t all that interesting of a photograph.  Most of the 30-40 images that I made that day all kind of ended up looking like this.  As I reviewed them in Adobe Bridge that night I was pretty disappointed and felt like the trip had largely been a waste of time.

In the end though there were a few compositions that I liked, and I wondered if something could be done to improve the overall image quality and aesthetics.  The raw image posted above was one of the ones that I hung my hopes on.

After some preliminary “tweaks” in Adobe Camera Raw, I opened the image in Photoshop.  My workflow is relatively straight-forward and consistent, image-to-image, and includes removing blemishes, leveling the horizon, cropping; and then involves the addition of a series of adjustment layers, including Curves, Levels, Hue/Saturation; and sometimes I’ll insert a Photo Filter layer or Black & White layer.  I always save a Photoshop Document (PSD) Master File that contains all of my layers so that I can go back and tinker with an image if desired or necessary.  When I am fairly well satisfied with the whole image, I’ll flatten it, add any gradients/color burns and then apply sharpening, and then save it again as a flattened PSD file, and then create an export copy as a JPEG for posting on the web.

So, how did it end up?  Well, here’s my interpretation of the scene that I encountered at the Trona Pinnacles on that very smokey afternoon–

 My Final Trona Pinnacles image after processing.

You can readily see that I leveled the horizon, cropped the image, added some contrast with the Curves layer, pushed my white and black points with the Levels layer, punched up the saturation just a bit.  Finally a good dose of Unsharp Mask really helped to add some crispness and detail.  In fact, there’s just enough detail now to notice some mountains off in the distance in the background.  Those mountains are essentially not visible in the ORF file.  Yes, the lighting conditions are still kind of strange, but they are generally portrayed fairly “honestly” in this image related to the actual scene as I encountered it.

Okay, I’ll be the first to admit this final “cleaned up” photograph is not an image that “knocks your socks off,” or is even likely to be much appreciated by most who view it.  It was, however, a good exercise for me to work through a few of these images to see if anything could be done with them, and I proved to myself that a decent photograph could be coaxed from the original raw data-file.  At the end of the day though, I do like this image as it truly does portray the otherworldly character of the Trona Pinnacles, and the smokey lighting conditions actually kind of contribute to the overall weirdness and sense of remoteness and desolation in this remote part of the California Desert.

What do you think?  Was I successful in trying to make a finished image from the initial ORF file?  Have you had experiences like this too?  I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments.