Picture perfect day. I wish I had of had the time to hike deeper into the canyon for a more dramatic shot…
I guess maybe I wonder if the scale is “too” grand without a hard specific focal point.
Is this a composite: No
D500, 17-35 Tokina @ 17mm, F/7.1, 1/200, ISO 160
50/50 ACR and PS using TK8 luminosity masks.
Chris, the scene is not too grand at all. In fact, seeing the big version, I can just get lost exploring. The mid day light is not too bad either, with no real harsh shadows.
I do see a bit of leaning on the left side. I wonder if a bit of perspective control would help with that? 17mm can really accentuate the leaning the camera isn’t perfectly level, no tilt…
Cheers,
David
Camera was level but the Tokina tends to give a bit more distortion than a Nikon lens, though Tokina makes a lot of the Nikon lenses…weird dichotomy. At any rate, I did a little distortion control, a bit of a warp here and yon and more perspective control…
Much better, Chris. I really like this scene.
Thanks, David…ging back and reworking old images has proven to be quite therapeutic.
It doesn’t get more dramatic than this, you already have achieved the classic composition of this well known spot. For non-golden hour light, you have processed this about as well as one could hope to to do, both color and contrast are well handled. With this type of light, you may want to consider also processing this as a B&W image, it would allow you to push the contrast further than you can in color.
As we speak… 
it is in the works but while I can get good tonal balance on the left side of the canyon, the right side just goes flat…back to the drawing board on this one…
Just for your information, Chris. It looks like you’ve attended to the lens distortion in Lightroom. The result being that you’ve lost a lot of what was in the original frame - not only from the right and left side but more especially from the top. The cloud now feels a little jammed up top. I don’t know if you use Photoshop or not, but you can do a much more controlled job correcting lens distortion (or distortion of any kind) using the warp tool. Here’s a little Phlearn introduction to using the warp tool in Photoshop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TrVYkJ53Dg
I did a warp before I did the perspective control…I’m back at the original to see if I can’t get the best of both worlds.
