Photoshop Tutorial – Postprocessing The Deadvlei

Here’s a real quick photoshop tutorial that shows how I post-processed this iconic image taken at the Deadvlei in Namibia.

Because this is such a surreal location I wanted to reflect this in the post processing.  Because of it’s iconic nature, there are plenty of wonderful natural-looking images of the Deadvlei, so I was trying to do something a bit more abstract in the post processing to put my own mark on it.

 

I hope you enjoy this short tutorial.

Brent

Namibia – Abstract Landscapes

 

One of the highlights of my trip to Namibia was visiting the Deadvlei near Sesriem.  From the time I first saw photos from this amazing place I said to myself “this is somewhere that I just have to photograph”.   The textures of the dry lake bed…. the abstract shapes of the petrified trees….. the beautiful red/orange sand dunes surrounding the lake are all like something out of a Dali painting.

A light painted image taken at night.

I ended up doing three shoots at this location.  A sunset shoot, followed by a sunrise shoot, and then a sunset/night shoot.  Similar to Kolmanskop, this location was a photographers dream… lots of different ways you could approach the shoot.  Different compositions, lighting and post processing all combined to make this a pretty special and surreal landscape.

I deliberately went pretty hard with the post processing.  The reason for this was that there are plenty of lovely “natural prints”,  however because this is such a surreal landscape, I wanted to add a bit of surreal processing to the post production to create an image that was a bit different to everybody elses.  The top image looks incredible when printed large on fine art paper (and on super glossy).

 

I’ll follow up with a tutorial on my post processing for some of these images in a few weeks once I have finished my image processing.