A City Awakens

[dje]

Just received my first GND filters and had to try them out. So I went up to Mt Coot-tha this morning to catch the sunrise. It didn't look too promising but in the end turned out OK, I think - but what do others think ? I used a 3 stop GND.

Dave

[jeeperman]

Dave, Nice capture. I do think it has a bit of a blue cast though. I did a color channel levels adjust by eye. I found it impossible with the dropper. This may or may not be to your taste but it does show the possible options.

[dje]

Thanks for your comments Paul. I think what you have done is an improvement but to be honest, to my eyes at least, the change is small but it is noticeable. It could have been caused by my processing as I did bump the colour saturation up a fair bit and did a minor tweek on the hue slider. Or I suppose it could have been caused by the GND filter but I think I need to take some more shots before jumping to that conclusion. (Don't tell Colin, but I didn't buy the Sigh-Ray filters he likes - too expensive for me at this stage - I went with Hitech)

Dave

[Polar01]

Dave: I took the liberty to remove that blue cast, reopened it in Raw, once for the sky to lighten and bring out some of the detail in the clouds, then reopen again in RAW to work the bottom, added a layer mask, inverted it to black, then painted out the mask to let the bottom portion come through. As you used GND filter on the shot, was it a hard grad or a soft grad, if it was a soft grad I think that a hard grad would have worked better as your horizion is flat and far off. Problem here with a soft grad is the sky is so strong that you have to lower it so low that it is affecting the bottom of the image causing it to be underexposed. Great comp it takes some time to get use to those filters.

Cheers:

Allan

[dje]

Allan thanks for your comments and interest. It was a hard grad filter and I did try to line it up on the horizon - but I'm new to this game !! That's an interesting effect you've come up with, I won't pretend to understand exactly what you did at this stage but i will go through it in more detail. One question - how do you open a jpeg in ACR ? - or did you use some other RAW software.

Dave

[dje]

One question - how do you open a jpeg in ACR ?

I can answer that question myself now, didn't realise it was an option in Bridge.

[FrankMi]

Hi Dave! When you get a fantastic image like this everybody wants to play with it (myself included). So much potential on so many fronts! Great job!

[dje]

Hi Dave! When you get a fantastic image like this everybody wants to play with it (myself included). So much potential on so many fronts! Great job!

Thanks Frank. Feel free to play !!

This is another similar shot I took, it probably has better exposure.

Dave

[FrankMi]

Thanks Frank. Feel free to play !!

Sorry it took so long to get back to you with this, Dave. This is such a fantastic image that I'm not sure that my playing with it has improved anything, but rather just provided one more possibility of what could be done. They say that 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.' so although it looks OK to me, it might not please anyone else.

OK, the steps taken - I opened the JPEG in ACR and it showed just a touch of blown highlights in the clouds so I increased the Recovery just enough to clear that. Next I reduced the noise ever so slightly and having noticed some halos in the clouds and tops of the buildings, pretty much left the sharpness alone not wanting to make the halos any more pronounced.

I then used layers to warm the blue of the city and reduce its contrast a bit, increased the contrast and brightness in the sunbeams, and increased the color warmth and brightness in the clouds some. This last step necessitated a readjustment of the final image in ACR to avoid the blown highlights in the clouds that I had introduced. Finally, I feathered the halos around the buildings and the most significant halos in the clouds to minimize their impact.



Thank you for letting me 'play'. I hope you like it!

[dje]

Excellent work Frank. Very dramatic. Thanks for taking the time to look at it. I'll work my way through your process. The sunbeams have come up very well. If you saved your work as a PSD I would love to get a copy.

Dave

[FrankMi]

Excellent work Frank. Very dramatic. Thanks for taking the time to look at it. I'll work my way through your process. The sunbeams have come up very well. If you saved your work as a PSD I would love to get a copy.

Dave

Bummer! I was thinking just after I deleted the PSD that maybe I should have saved it, even though there was no thought of returning to it. Sorry Dave.

Perhaps the PP philosophy I used would be of help. For landscapes, I look for something interesting in all three parts of the image (foreground, mid-ground/subject, and background). This is my alternate 'rule of thirds' and your image was about as perfect as you can get in satisfying that rule. When you stop and think about it that means that the sunbeams should be the subject but they weren't grabbing the attention they deserve.

When I looked at your image, I thought the most of the drama was in the sky but the foreground was competing strongly so I wanted to minimize its impact, hence the contrast reduction and diminishing the intensity of the blue more toward the yellows in the sky.

The 'glue' between the three sections that really holds the attention was the sunbeams, right across the middle of the image so the contrast on that part was increased as well as the brightness to bring out the sunbeams as much as possible. The clouds were really quite fine but I increased the contrast there as well to better match the transition to the sunbeams. Because I did the warming on the entire image first, all three sections were affected.

[dje]

Bummer! I was thinking just after I deleted the PSD that maybe I should have saved it, even though there was no thought of returning to it. Sorry Dave.

Perhaps the PP philosophy I used would be of help. For landscapes, I look for something interesting in all three parts of the image (foreground, mid-ground/subject, and background). This is my alternate 'rule of thirds' and your image was about as perfect as you can get in satisfying that rule. When you stop and think about it that means that the sunbeams should be the subject but they weren't grabbing the attention they deserve.

When I looked at your image, I thought the most of the drama was in the sky but the foreground was competing strongly so I wanted to minimize its impact, hence the contrast reduction and diminishing the intensity of the blue more toward the yellows in the sky.

The 'glue' between the three sections that really holds the attention was the sunbeams, right across the middle of the image so the contrast on that part was increased as well as the brightness to bring out the sunbeams as much as possible. The clouds were really quite fine but I increased the contrast there as well to better match the transition to the sunbeams. Because I did the warming on the entire image first, all three sections were affected.

No problem Frank, I can still work through your ideas.

Dave