The original photo was taken during our South Iceland Tour in late 2018. This is everyone’s favourite word to mangle, Eyjafjallajökull, or, as you may know it, “That ice cap over that volcano in Iceland that erupted in 2010 and caused huge disruption to flights across Europe.”
This is what I refer to as my classic black and white processing of an image and it requires a number of photos at different exposures plus Photomatix HDR software. First, I took the original RAW photo, cropped it, straightened it, removed any sensor dirt, and applied basic sharpening and noise reduction. I converted it to black and white and set basic brightness/saturation levels for the colours in the picture data then saved it along with four additional saves faking different exposures at -0.5, -1, +0.5, and +1.0, ensuring highlights weren’t blown and shadows weren’t drowning out detail in each case. I loaded these images as bracketed photos in Photomatix and used a Tone Mapping process with Details Enhancer method. Lighting Adjustments were set for a natural look, Gamma set fairly low, Strength and Detail Contrast up high, and other values were adjusted until I was happy with the level of contrast, detail, and moodiness. The processed TIFF was brought back into Photoshop for some final Smart Sharpening and conversion to JPEG for the web.