Hoar Frost 1

While driving to get to Valley View in Yosemite I noticed there was some frost on the trees that I should look at more closely. At first I considered coming back to it later in the day, but then I saw a rainbow in Upper Yosemite Falls that I knew wasn't going to stick around.

The hoar frost formed long needles on the branches. Later, when I drove past the trees again, the sun had shown on them and the frost had sublimed away.

From the raw image, the first adjustment was to bring the color temperature back into the proper range. The scene had confused the camera and it thought the color temperature was about 6000 K. The issue here was that the scene was still too blue shifted. To bring the blue and red into agreement, the color temperature was adjusted to 9000 K. The next step was to make the white closer to white rather than grey - in this case, the color of the frost was close to my target 180 in each channel.

Looking at the histogram of the image I realized that the difference between the red, green, and blue channels was minimal and the hint of color in spots was slightly distracting, and so I finished the image by converting it to black and white.