This was taken during the bitter cold week earlier this winter. It has taken me a while to figure out how to process this shot—snow is very bright, shadows are very dark, and the mountain is lit in a very subtle way (backlit is the technical term).
I finally hit on the key steps to get a good image this evening:
Isolate the mountain, and increase its contrast. This was done with two sub-steps:
Literally increase the contrast
Increate the Clarity setting, which adjust micro contrast (contrast of small, adjacent differences in brightness)
Decrease the Clarity of the snow (this reduces the brutally sharp contrast), and lighten it relative to the rest of the shot
Very carefully adjust the contrast settings for the darkest parts of the image (the evergreen trees in the middle portion). These tended to be too black in almost all of the earlier efforts, and I took steps to preserve what little detail they had when processing the image
That last step meant doing to processing over from the beginning. Sometimes, you can ignore a small area of a shot when you are processing the overall look and feel, and wind up with areas that simply don’t work. This was that.
In the end, I wind up with a black and white shot that retains the 3D presence of most of the scene, and shows Mt. Rainier for the hulking brut that it truly is. Majestic, yes, but also brooding and massive.
Taken about 25 miles away from the mountain, but as always Rainier manages to feel like it’s in your back yard.
The mountain is shadowy and wispy and even more so when I zoom in and allow it to fill the frame on my larger screen laptop.
Elegant. I followed your thinking and process with interest. Decreasing the intensity and brightness of the snow was a good idea. If it were a painting I’m not sure I would have thought of that solution. An elegant photograph.