Mt. Rainier before sunset, with moon

It took me a while to figure out how to process this image, but I think I got it now.

When I took this shot, I was happy: I have been hoping to capture the slight yellow cast that Mt. Rainier gets an hour or two before sunset. I got everything right, but when I looked at the image in Capture One (my software for editing images), found multiple issues that I would have to deal with:

• I could see the yellow with my eyes, but any time I tried to balance light and dark in the image, it disappeared. I had to find an editing sequence that wouldn’t hide the subtle color.

• There were various problems with the color of the sky. There was a tiny dark cloud at upper right; I decided to leave it in (but I have a version where I cloned it out, too). There were distant clouds that cast faint shadows on the sky (I’m guessing that dust and moisture in the air can be darkened by clouds many miles away if they in the cloud’s shadow). The thunderhead behind the mountain has a completely different (and subtle) brightness profile compared to the mountain (adjust the cloud ruined the mountain; adjusting the mountain ruined the clouds).

• There is a huge brightness difference between the foreground and the sky. Getting one right easily made a mess of the other.

I had to take my time and learn new image editing skills. I was able to mute the sky color and brightness differences using masks. I was able to gently edit the foreground to bring out the colors of the vegetation just enough to make them visible, without bringing up a ton of detail that competed with the mountain and sky. And I was eventually able to to find edit settings that worked for both the mountain and the clouds.

And the moon? It just so happened that the edits I used to get mountain and sky to keep their slight yellow highlight also worked to make the moon its natural white. Couldn’t ask for better than that.

Very happy with the result; very happy with all the new things I’ve learned. Shot with Sony α1 camera and Zeiss Otus 100mm f/1.4 lens.