Carlsbad Caverns and Topaz

Taken in Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico. This shot was hand-held at 1/20 sec, f 4.0, ISO 4000. The lighting is provided by fixed artificial lights and sadly the highlights were a little blown. I found that I could recover the details in the shadows better with Topaz than Lightroom, but I have some more ideas and I might work more on the image in the future.

The work was all done in Topaz Studio, with BW providing a lot of the recovery, then precision contrast, then precision details, then denoise, then duotone.

Original

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Nice job in bring out the details …

nice captures. not so easy to take pictures in these caves.

Nice capture with challenging conditions.

Thank you very much for the very nice comments, @BobKramer, @Laundromat and @cre8art, I appreciate them very much. It was fun trying different photo techniques in the cave and different processing methods now.

These caves are very nicely developed and are really amazing and fun to visit in real life. (I would not want to go to caves where you have to crawl or slither through dark, narrow passageways - that would not be my idea of fun)

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Very impressive.

I went there many years ago and this is a huge cavern. It took four hours to walk to the bottom (stopping for pictures) and I used the elevator to go back up. I remember eating lunch at the bottom as well. Do they still have that? The second picture is closer to the way it looked.

Very cool! Wow on the detail after PP.

Thank you for the very nice comments, @tebel53, @Artisan-West and @Michigander, they are very encouraging.

Ron, the caves are still fun to visit, the place to get food and elevators are still there and have not changes too much. The bottom photo does a good job of capturing how the park service lights the cave, but I am glad that Topaz is powerful enough to reveal a lot of the details that would otherwise be hidden.

And it is always fun to take a cave tour when the rangers turn out all of the lights - the darkness is almost absolute and hard to describe…