If you think Death Valley does not get cold, you are way wrong. This was taken at sunrise on December 26 a couple years ago. It was so cold, I thought my face was frozen, my fingers wouldn’t move right and had no feeling, and I almost knocked over my tripod.
Needless to say, and as you can see from the before, I wasn’t really glued in on much more than composition and how soon I could get back in the car. Luckily, DSLRs today are a bit more forgiving than film. And, there is quite a lot more recorded in the image than is obvious at first look. I wanted to take the image back an hour or so to the very beginning of a warming new day in a desolate place.
I did a number of masks of foreground, middle, and sky in Photoshop. But, ultimately I wound up doing all those edits in Lightroom as my Photoshop skills are not what they need to be.