Fire Hole River

[FrankMi]

Looking for feedback on ways to improve the post processing of this shot.

SOOC



After PP



Any and all comments are appreciated!

[rpcrowe]

Best way to fix this image would be to add me and a flyrod. Sorry, Frank, I couldn't resist that!

[epmi314]

I'll take a stab at it....

Concerned I lost some of the detail in the bridge

[Ken MT]

Would have loved to see a polariser on the origional shot. It would have given a different look to the water

[Dizzy]

Best way to fix this image would be to add me and a flyrod.
Sorry, Frank, I couldn't resist that!

Agreed...there's got to be a few fat trout hanging around the edge of that drop and
white water.

Frank: took my best shot at it. In Lightroom3, used graduated filter to reduce the glare
on the water, and brought out the clouds a bit. The cliff area on the right had blue in it
that I tried to tone down, but just couldn't do much with it.

9rrs7m-2.jpg

Mike

[FrankMi]

I'll take a stab at it....

Concerned I lost some of the detail in the bridge

Hi Scott, the SOOC bridge was fairly dark so it likely didn't have a lot of detail to begin with. In my effort, I increased the brightness significantly and decreased the contrast slightly of just the bridge.

Your background looks more realistic then mine. One of the reasons for posting this was the problems I was having with White Balance which rendered the hills in the background with a blue tint. I have not yet figured out how to effectively set the color balance sliders. I can easily make it look worse but have a devil of a time trying to set them properly to correct things like the blue tint in the hills.

The SOOC cropping with a touch of foreground bank for depth, made the river as the subject. I think this landscape cropping shifts the subject from the river to the bridge so in my mind, this cropping would work if we can get a better rendition of the bridge. Your thoughts?

[FrankMi]

Best way to fix this image would be to add me and a flyrod. Sorry, Frank, I couldn't resist that!

LOL! Richard, you're thiking more like a fisherman than a photographer today!

[FrankMi]

Would have loved to see a polariser on the origional shot. It would have given a different look to the water

So true! Funny that you should mention that, Ken. It was the lack of an adapter for this camera to mount a polarizing filter that pushed me over the edge to get the DSLR!

[FrankMi]

Frank: took my best shot at it. In Lightroom3, used graduated filter to reduce the glare on the water, and brought out the clouds a bit. The cliff area on the right had blue in it that I tried to tone down, but just couldn't do much with it.

Hi Mike,

Thank you for taking a crack at this. The clouds look better. The water had quite a bit of sun sparkle on it in the original, do you think it now looks a little darker than it would be in reality?

The cliff area is a problem for me as well. I wouldn’t think that the image was improperly exposed and it’s not like the scene was all that unusual but for some reason I’m having trouble with the color balance. One thing that I have a lot of difficulty with, is understanding exactly how to move the sliders in the color balance adjustment layer. I find that even a slight change can make it look worse but I lack the technique for adjusting it to look better. <sigh> If there is a process, I can learn it, but if it is an ‘art’ thing, no hope!

[rpcrowe]

So true! Funny that you should mention that, Ken. It was the lack of an adapter for this camera to mount a polarizing filter that pushed me over the edge to get the DSLR!

My first Digital camera was the Olympus P&S (in the days when DSLR cameras were priced way out of my budget and really did not provide that good imagery for the price).

I switched to a Canon 10D when that camera came out at a price I could justify.

A major problem for me was also that using a CPL was problematic. The shutter delay was also a factor in my move to a DSLR. I haven't looked back.

I tend to use a CPL on most outdoor shots, unless it is contraindicated (usually by light levels). I don't always rotate the CPL to its fullest extent. I use top-line CPL filters (B&W mostly).

[FrankMi]

Hi Richard,

I have Hoya CPL's for all three of my DSLR lenses but rarely use them as I don't often notice issues where I need them, at least not as yet in the short time I've had them. Do you use yours very much for color?

[FrankMi]

When I first started working on this image in Photoshop, I felt the image looked underexposed even though the histogram looked normal. The sky and background lacked contrast and the bridge was too dark and too high a contrast.

I masked the sky and increased the contrast which made it go significantly towards Cyan. I have found that when a contrast adjustment changes the color, that I need to check the white balance and with my skill (or lack thereof) I felt I needed a mid-tone neutral gray reference to set the white balance so I used the following tutorial to get the reference point for this image. http://www.photoshopessentials.com/p.../neutral-gray/.

The result was that the image went toward a bluer tint – definitely not what I was expecting. I saved the blue-ish image out as a JPEG and opened it ACR to see if I could cross check the white balance there. In the end, I used ACR to set the white balance to what I thought looked correct and brought it back into Photoshop as an additional layer.

When I looked at the Red, Green, and Blue channels in a Levels adjustment layer, they were all significantly off to the right (entirely past the mid-point of the histogram) for the sky. As the sky was masked I tried to adjust the channels and the color of the sky went bazaar. Obviously this was not the correct approach. In the end, I backed off all the changes and went back to a copy of the original image.

I increased the sky brightness to 44 and the contrast to 100.

For the background (minus the bridge) I set the brightness to 40, contrast to 100, vibrance to 20, saturation to 10, levels to 1, 1.15, and 251, curves to a slight s-curve, and color balance mid-tone Cyan-Red to +10, Magenta-Green to 0, and Yellow-Blue to -20.

For the bridge is set the brightness to 80 and the contrast to -20.

For the foreground (river) I set the brightness and contrast both to 50, the Hue/Saturation to 0, 20, 0, and the Vibrance to 20,10. I also sharpened ONLY the foreground rock and grass.

Here is what the masks look like.



By this point, my highly logical approach to PP workflow had disintegrated into a morass of ‘does it look better now’ series of guesses.

I really need to find a logical sequence of steps that will avoid this guesswork when it comes to adjusting color.