10 Hide the alerts
All this cross-hatching can make it hard to judge the effectiveness of the image as a whole, but you don’t have to disable your zone alerts completely – you can simply hide them by de-selecting the checkbox underneath the histogram.
11 Tonality Protection
Now I can see that the sun-facing sides of the rocks in the foreground are just a little too bright and harsh. I’m not going to try to fix them with control points (how many would that take?). Instead, I’m using the Highlights slider (circled) in the Tonality Protection section of the Global Adjustment panel just to pull back the highlights globally.
12 The finished picture
This is just so much better than the start shot, and I think the key is the digital re-interpretation of Ansel Adam’s Zone System and darkroom techniques. You have to create an image with a full tonal range to start from, and then use dodging and burning techniques to balance the tones in the picture and make the composition work.
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