PP Challenge #11 - THE RESULTS

[Donald]

Over 100 entries. Over 100 people voting. This one broke all the records.

And what's the result at the end of the day .......................?

Because there were so many entries and votes, we should note the two runner up entries.

These were:

From Peter (conkerwood):

From Kris (KrisV)

AND THE WINNER IS .............

Wendy (ScoutR) with ..............

Congratulations to all 3 and to everyone else who took part. It was great fun to watch them all coming in.

Wendy - You now are invited to tell us what you did. And also to submit a file for the next challenge. I'll PM you about this.

[Andrew1]

Very nice Wendy. Great results among some very good submissions. Congrat's

[Maritimer1]

Beautiful processing, Wendy. Congrats! Looking at all the different versions that people created was a pleasure.

[conkerwood]

Congrats, Wendy a really fine job. I think your pic and several others got the best out of the available subdued tones but it was the aggressive crop which set your picture apart. A good example of where it is sometimes better to take away rather than to add and over complicate. The result is a nicely balanced pic which uses the rule of thirds to great advantage. Well done and well done to all the other entries.

Peter

[ScoutR]

Wendy - You now are invited to tell us what you did. And also to submit a file for the next challenge. I'll PM you about this.

Well, this is a pleasant surprise and another first for me. Thanks to Donald for posting such a great image to work with. So many great entries, I would have been thrilled to get a few votes, let alone win. Actually, the vote of confidence is just what I needed right now. I've been away for awhile, but hope to get back into things soon. Hopefully this will help to motivate me.

Now the hard part - trying to read the history and post the settings that I used.

Raw processing was done in Lightroom 3 and then I took it into Elements for some dodging and burning and the final resizing and sharpening.

As soon as I looked at this shot, I knew I wanted to crop out the creek. It did not seem to belong in the shot and distracted from the main subjects drawing my eye out of instead of into the scene. Knowing Donald's penchant for square crops and the perfectly positioned trees and building also helped make this a pretty easy decision.

The next thing I wanted to do was bring more detail and colour into the shot without loosing the atmosphere. Usually in the fog the foreground is clear and then fades out in the distance. This shot was foggy (hazy) throughout and rightly or wrongly I wanted to change that, so my goal was to have more colour and detail in the foreground and keep the hill behind the building in the fog.

The other thing I wanted to do was to have more detail in the building and try to highlight the winding creek behind it.

With those thoughts in mind I did the crop and then started adjusting sliders in Lightroom. Here are the final settings in Lightroom. For what it's worth I'm not sure the numbers mean that much, but I do hope that they are helpful. The important thing to me is to figure out what I like or don't like and to have a final image in my minds eye. When I have that figured out, I make adjustments to the appropriate sliders until it looks right (to me)




Settings3 by Wendy FS, on Flickr

The most important sliders for me in this image were
Black point

White Balance, which in this case is just personal preference. I'm sure the original white balance was more true, but I have a tendency to like warmer colours, soooo.... I changed it. (Sorry Donald)

Brightness and contrast figured into this also, but I found the luminance sliders very helpful and as you can see I made adjustments to red, yellow orange and green to try and get the foreground brighter and more colourful - sort of a sun breaking through effect. Again, personal preference and not likely the way Donald saw the scene, but what looked good to me.

When all was said and done, I was still not happy with the effect. All the adjustments were global and it still looked flat to me. I wanted more of a difference between foreground and background. I don't know how to do layers in Elements so I tried graduated filters in Lighroom and ended up with one on top and one in the foreground. I had to play with the placement before I got what I wanted but using the filters in this way I was able to darken the foreground and lighten the background the way i imagined the scene. Here are some screen clips of the filters and settings.


GradTop-2 by Wendy FS, on Flickr


GradBottom-3 by Wendy FS, on Flickr

After the filters were added I tweaked some of the global adjustments and that was it for Lightroom.

Just a note on the initial sharpening in LR. I'm not very good at picking out sharpening artefact's, and i hope I don't have any here, but LR seems to sharpen differently than Elements. I would never use .9 Radius to sharpen in Elements, but somehow or other it seems to work in LR. If anyone has any thoughts on this, I'd really like to hear them. I never go over .3 Radius in Elements.

Things still looked a little dull to me and I thought I would like to emphasize the patterns in the grass on the hill in front of the building and also try to bring out some detail in the creek behind the building, so off to Elements for some dodging of highlights and burning of shadows. I ended up doing a lot of dodging and burning everywhere - always lightening highlights and darkening shadows - the fence posts, the tree trunks the dark parts of the grass, the building and the hill behind the building and the creek.

I doubt this is the scene Donald saw, but to me it either needed to be foggier or needed some of the haze removed. I went with removing the haze, not sure if I could have made it foggier or not.

Thanks again everyone. I really am thrilled that you like my edit, and hope I didn't go overboard with the notes, they are meant to help. I know there are many here far more advanced and proficient in Lightroom than I am, so I'm certainly open to suggestions also as to how I might have tried things differently.

Wendy

P.S. Does anyone know how to place images side by side in a post?

Edit: Thanks Dave, I followed your instructions below and got the first 2 images moved side by side. I purposely did not put the flicker links. I see now where the line return was messing things up.

[Donald]

P.S. Does anyone know how to place images side by side in a post?

I think it's possible, but I'd like to know that as well.

Wendy - that is a wonderful note of explanation and those wishing to learn more about post-processing would be well advised to study. Thank you.

And watch out for PP Challenge #12 folks. It will be along in a few days time.

[Wendy Stanford]

Congratulations to Wendy, Peter and Kris, great processing.
Thanks wendy for the very comprehensive explaination, very informative

[Dave Humphries]

Congrats Wendy, love that result.

I was just thinking I hadn't seen much from you lately (yes, I missed you) and here you go winning a challenge

P.S. Does anyone know how to place images side by side in a post?

Try this;
On a new line, paste the IMG tagged image, hit space, then put the second image, let line wrapping take care of itself.

What complicates it for you is the carriage return used to put the Flickr urls in under the image(s), so leave that until later and do them on a new line in same way as the img tags with a space between 'em.

Let me just try that ...



Settings1-2 by Wendy FS, Settings2-2 by Wendy FS, on Flickr

That's a relief, it worked

Well done on your win,

[arith]

Fantastic job Wendy; I'm looking forward to the next one. Congratulations.

[Steve S]

Congrats to wendy, kris, and peter. All were very well done. Looking forward to the next one.

[Ken Curtis]

Congratulations, Wendy. Job well done and the recognition is certainly deserved.

[birdypic]

Very well done Wendy. It is great to see the winning entry selected as a consequence of quality pp based on attention to detail. Sadly some still fall for the lure of an instant result from preset templates offered by various websites, (3 clicks and you have a masterpiece) but your entry will hopefully encourage others to trust their own creativity and learn how to use the many PP tools that we are so fortunate to have available. Again well done and well done to the many entrants who didn't take the short cut easy road but rather chose to try for something original.

[ga6742]

I apologize in advance but I just have to ask. Am I the only one that
can see the white spot between the trees. I love what Wendy has done
and would have voted for it but for the spot. Should I have ignored it?

[Donald]

I apologize in advance but I just have to ask. Am I the only one that
can see the white spot between the trees.

Do you mean whatever is on the fence wire? That was on the original RAW file.

I love what Wendy has done and would have voted for it but for the spot. Should I have ignored it?

That's entirely up to you. If you felt that the removal of it was fundamental to the processing of the image and that failure to do so was a shortcoming in post-processing then you were entitled to consider it a factor in your decision.

All we can deduce from the result is that a sufficient number people found her work to be of such a high standard that removal of that light thing on the fence was not relevant or that its removal was not needed.

[ga6742]

That's entirely up to you. If you felt that the removal of it was fundamental to the processing of the image and that failure to do so was a shortcoming in post-processing then you were entitled to consider it a factor in your decision.

All we can deduce from the result is that a sufficient number people found her work to be of such a high standard that removal of that light thing on the fence was not relevant or that its removal was not needed.

Thanks Donald. You are right of course. I looked at many of the entries and was surprised to see the spot there in most, including my own. I now see that the difference is that Wendy's cropped version made it more prominent.

[DonTX]

Congratulations Wendy! And many thanks for the detailed explanation of how you processed the RAW file. I'll definitely copy and paste your steps for reference on future photos that I work on.

Don in TX

[Kris V]

Congratulations, Wendy!

Seeing all these beautiful submissions, I never expected to end as runner-up.
Thanks to all who voted for my entry!

[FrankMi]

Congratulations to all three of the top contenders. Each version has something unique to offer.

Wendy has certainly proved that you don't need Photoshop to turn out a winning composition. Congratulations Wendy on your skillful use of Lightroom and Elements.

[ScoutR]

I apologize in advance but I just have to ask. Am I the only one that
can see the white spot between the trees. I love what Wendy has done
and would have voted for it but for the spot. Should I have ignored it?

Hi George, you are not the only one who saw it. Unfortunately, I did not notice it until after I had posted. I could have edited the post but decided to leave it as it was. It's definitely something I would have removed had I noticed it at the time.

Wendy

[ga6742]

Hi George, you are not the only one who saw it. Unfortunately, I did not notice it until after I had posted. I could have edited the post but decided to leave it as it was. It's definitely something I would have removed had I noticed it at the time.

Hi Wendy.....You are very gracious, besides being talented. I really did think your result was the best but I had to know about that spot.