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Heceta Head State Scenic Viewpoint – The Cape Perpetua Scenic Area

Florence, Oregon.

U.S. Highway 101 is one of the premier scenic drives in the United States. It runs from southern California to Washington, much of the way along the Pacific coast. When I was a youngster in school in Long Beach, California, I learned that the highway is also known as El Camino Real (Spanish for the royal road, or the king’s highway.)

In southern California, that name was derived from the fact that it loosely followed the trails between Catholic missions that were about a day’s walk between them. However, once you get to the more northerly portions of the highway, it loses the name reference, though it could still be considered a royal road with views fit for a king.

Near the Heceta Head Lighthouse in central Oregon, a sign will take you off scenic Highway 101. The Heceta Head State Scenic Viewpoint in Oregon is a worthy stop. You will wind down a small access road to a parking lot. There is a fee for parking there, but the view of the beach alone is worth $5 USD. If you feel like a short hike, you can take a trail to the lighthouse or even more challenging trails.

The parking lot was relatively full with many people on the beach with an unknown number surely walking the trail to the lighthouse. I noticed that the waves occasionally crashed high on the rocky coastline near two giant rock outcroppings. I waited patiently for a large group of people to move out of the range of my camera. There were now only two people in the opening image’s midground, just enough to help show the scale of the image.

I was transfixed by the waves crashing on the rocky coastline.

Moving closer and activating my zoom lens, I waited some more to attempt to capture the waves crashing higher than usual. I went about capturing several images with shutter speeds of 1/4000 to 1/8000 second to catch the wave in mid-crash. The image above was at 1/8000 second and the Auto-ISO adjusted itself to 3600 and I set myself a trap for the next few images.

The Cape Creek Bridge.

Turning toward the parking lot and the entrance to the viewpoint, I was intent on photographing the unique architectural design of the bridge that carries traffic via Highway 101 across Cape Creek. Construction completed in 1932, the art deco design details popular in that era give the bridge a sense of old-world designs. It was here that I fell into the trap of my own making.

I set the lens opening to f/13 to provide a wide depth of field. Of course, I forgot to reset my shutter speed to a more reasonable setting. After all, the bridge doesn’t need a 1/5000 of a second exposure to stop the action. Trust me, it doesn’t move that much. Compounded by the fact that the terrain around the bridge didn’t receive as much light from the sky, the Auto-ISO setting ended up being 6400.

I had no intention of using the shot once I saw it in my Lightroom catalog. First of all, I didn’t like the composition. I could have done much better. Making lemonade out of this lemon of a shot, I decided to use it to compare noise removal tools. A few months ago, Skylum Software released an extension to Luminar Neo called Noiseless AI. Just recently (as this is being written in late May,) Adobe released a Denoise tool in a recent Lightroom CC update. The three images at high magnification below tell the story.

Screenshot of the original RAW file from my Nikon 500 as viewed at 200%.
Luminar Neo’s Noiseless extension.
Lightroom Classic’s Denoise tool.

The winner is clear, Adobe’s Denoise function provides a better job at noise reduction. It does have a limitation right now that isn’t a problem for Neo. So far, as of late May, Denoise works only with RAW images from two different sensor types. From the Adobe blog site, “Denoise is currently supported only for Bayer and X-Trans mosaic raw files, but we’re looking into ways to support other photo formats in the future.” What that means is that most RAW files will work, but not all. Even Adobe DNG files cannot use the tool at this point. Of course, neither can JPG files. The article I found on the Adobe Blog describes in great detail the tool and its best practice uses. There are plenty of samples and examples to check out. Read the article here.

Neo’s Noiseless module works with RAW, DNG, and JPG files. I ended up using the Neo-processed file for the bridge image even though the noise level is slightly higher than the Lightroom Classic file. I’d tweaked the image slightly differently and the clouds had more detail than I drew from the Lightroom version.

I also noticed that the Adobe images are slightly less sharp on object edges. That is really a minor nitpick as the sharper edges of the Neo image are marred by a higher level of remaining noise. Finally, I don’t have personal experience with Topaz Labs DeNoise AI, but everything I’ve seen points to DeNoise AI doing a better job than either Denoise or Noiseless. For my use, as I already subscribe to Lightroom and I have Neo for JPG and DNG files, this experiment told me that I don’t really need to buy the Topaz Labs add-in. After all, I don’t do much low-light photography and if I can just remember to check my camera settings before I shoot, I wouldn’t need noise reduction at all. >grin<

You can view these images in 2K HD via my Flickr album here.

John Steiner

51 comments

  5. This is beautiful John. Your patience paid off. I’ve only seen a bit of the Oregon coast but it is dramatic and beautiful. We photographers often spend time waiting for people to get out of our images.

    Reply

  23. Such a beautiful area! We drove on 101 from Washington to just north of San Francisco. We stopped at the Sea Lions Cave in Oregon and had a great view of the Heceta Head lighthouse. I really enjoyed seeing your photos of what we were looking at.

    Reply

  24. I love the shot of the waves crashing on the rocks! And an interesting exercise to compare denoise tools. I have Topaz DeNoise AI and am very happy with the results I get from it. I also now have Topaz Photo AI which can do several jobs at once, including denoise and sharpening. I find myself increasingly turning to that if I’m not happy with the overall appearance of a shot. I’ve never really got on with Luminar, I don’t like its workflow, so I use that much less often these days and wouldn’t pay for any of the new extensions.

    Reply

      • It’s not so much the complications – I don’t like the way I have to import images (rather than drag and drop as with Elements or Topaz) and I don’t find the editing workflow so intuitive.

      • I stick to Lightroom Classic because it does a much better job of managing my catalog than Luminar Neo, even though using it adds an extra step. Also, Lightroom Classic does a couple of things that Luminar isn’t as proficient doing.
        To help with Luminar’s edit menu, I selected my most used tools as “Favorites” so they all appear right at the top of the tool list. Then, if I need something less usual, I can go find it in the main menu structure.

  25. I think zoomed out your image of the bridge is still a beautiful picture, John. I know some photographers (and judges in photography salons) can be really nitpicky about the technical aspects. I on the other hand find myself on the side of those admiring the subject of the photograph rather than the photograph itself.

    Reply

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