Basic image adjustments for landscape photos

Question

I am wondering what some basic adjustments are in Aperture that people make to their landscape photos. I am at a high altitude, and many of my pics are bright and sometimes a little washed out. I use Auto Contrast sometimes, but then it sometimes goes too far, and appears too dark. I was just wondering if there are some routine adjustments that one can make to enhance the image, without making it look unnatural. Something just to take out the haze, without affecting color.

Answer 1

Hello Pritch,
I would recommend to adapt the camera to high altitude conditions, rather then to do too much post processing.
Pritch wrote:
I am at a high altitude, and many of my pics are bright and sometimes a little washed out. I use Auto Contrast sometimes, but then it sometimes goes too far, and appears too dark.
There are three scattering effects that do influence pictures at high altitudes: Rayleigh scattering, caused by scattering of the molecules of the atmosphere that tints the pictures blue,  Mie-Scattering and non-selective scattering from small particles (pollen, dust, fog) that makes them appear hazy and washed out. The amount of corruption depends on the meteoroligal conditions, only the Rayleigh scattering is always present.
At what altitude are you? Do you know, if the CCD-Sensor in your camera blocks UV-light completely  (some Sony sensors do) or lets some of  the UV pass? If the latter were the case, then you will notice quite a lot of Rayleigh-scattering from blue and UV light turning your pictures blue at high altitudes, and you might consider to use a Skylight filter or even an UV Filter; in lower terrain that usually is unnecessary, since the lens absorbs most of the UV.
For landscape photograpy the filter should be a flare less one, otherwise the lens flare will spoil the picture.
And - if you do not do it already - correct the white balance at the time you take the picture, the default white balance settings of the camera usually are optimized for lower terrain.
To correct the effects of Rayleigh scattering after taking the picture you have to adjust the colors selectively to dim the blue, depending on the amount of additive blue in the picture. A white balance correction might do that if you are lucky.
The Mie scattering and non selective scattering reduce the contrast and dim the colors by adding white to the picture. To compensate them you would need a white-subtraction filter (not white balance), Aperture does not have it.
But you can achieve quite good results with a combination of black point correction, enhance definition, enhance contrast, and a slight increase of saturation. I cannot recommend default settings for these filters, because the amount of correction needed will depend on the meteorological conditions. Also, you may not want to remove the haze completely, because it will give depth to the picture and might be artistically pleasing.
A nice example on how to deal with haze is in this thread
Regards
Léonie