Crater Lake Panorama

Crazy Blue Crater Lake

Took a quick trip up to Crater Lake National Park in Oregon Saturday. It was as stunning as I remembered it. My first visit here was in the late '90's when helping my friend Cory get back to California for summer break. He was going to school in Washington and he planned a stop here. I'd never heard of it, and this being before the widespread adoption of smart phones and mobile internet, all I could find out about the place was from a AAA map. I had never seen water so blue before, or since. Tahoe is close, but not near as stunning. Interesting note, Crater Lake is not actually formed due to a meteor impacting but from a volcano.

In terms of the photo, I kind of jumped the gun with how I share. I normally try to share the photo on the blog and social media at the same time, but after processing the photo I was really liking it and posted to G+ and the others first. The shot is a handheld six shot panorama stitched in Photoshop Elements (usually the only time I go into Photoshop). I then went through my current workflow which is to work on exposure in Aperture, then go to +Topaz Labs for more targeted work. Because I always have noise in deep blue skies I went to DeNoise for the sky and the lake. I then masked out the rim and the foreground with the original photo to keep the detail there. I used InFocus to get some sharpening done, then my favorite tool Clarity and the Sunny - Blue Sky preset to adjust contrast and make things pop some. And then to give a final oomph to the photo I used Detail to get the textures of the rim to standout a bit more and the trees. Also, Detail is on sale with Topaz and is a great way to add creative sharpening to your photo. Check it out, and use "aprdetail" on checkout to get 50% off.

The photo turned out to be over 36 megapixels and the full size shot is 9622 x 3808, making for a pretty large print. If I print another metal panorama, I think this might be a contender.