Critique requested

[GreedyRogue]

This is my first photo to be seen by anyone other than my wife. Feel free to be harsh, as long as you can give good reason.




Technical specs;
Canon T2i
Mamiya/Sekor 55mm lens
1/200
ISO 100

I also did another version with the sunlight cropped out on the left hand side, but felt that it made the image too dark. To be honest, this was probably taken at the wrong time of day, but I like it none-the-less. Original photo can be found here if you would like to do any edits and reupload.

[FrankMi]

Hi William, no need to be harsh, only helpful, if I can. This looks like a pano from about 6-8 images so it is fairly large and detailed. That takes a lot of work but gives you a lot to work with.

The technical aspects look good and the composition is excellent. You have recovered most, if not all of the shadow detail and having the sun in a different position might produce a different but not necessarily better set of shadows.

The image has good angles and is a very interesting composition. In short, I can't find much to critique. I could definitely PP it differently but it would be for exploring options and, it would not necessarily be any better. I like it and think you have done very well. Others may find things to suggest for changes as I don't always see every possible item that could be improved.

[Kaclarity]

Will
I really like the shot and have been playing with it in PP. With my eye the brightness of the cliff and rock pull my attention to them losing the beauty of the waterfall. I belive that this is one of those photos that you can spend hours PPing. I tried the shot in B&W and I really liked it. All I can say dont be afraid to show more of your stuff, I'm looking forward to seeing more. JimC

[dje]

Looks pretty good William. As the others have said, all it really needs is a bit of pp to give it a bit more "pop". I suggest

• Some Local Contrast Enhancement (eg Unsharp mask) to bring out the texture in the cliff face
• Adjust the Highlights and Shadows (particularly drop the highlights)
• Perhaps a small increase in colour saturation
• Reduce the brightness in the left hand bottom corner (the direct sunlight). I would do this using a Brightness Adjustment layer in conjunction with a gradient diagonally across the bottom LH corner.

Dave

[GreedyRogue]

This was actually stitched in cs5 by 14 different images. A lot got cropped out because there is a road on the left hand side. If you look at the original, you can see how much I actually cut out. I am really surprised by how it turned out considering this was hand held, and one of my few pano attempts. Cs5 did a wonderful job stitching these.

The other crop I did gets rid of most of the brightness distractions, but at the cost of so much picture. With a tighter crop, you lose a lot of the distraction, but it makes the overall image less appealing to me. I think I will revisit this one later to try and even out the sunlight more. Maybe a pano from the bottom of the waterfall area would work better.

[tbob]

I think the road gives a better sense of scale as does the cliff face running off to the left in the original. I would have left it in for the final image. However I can see how your preference for your final interpretation is also valid. I concur with the others about the post processing.

Interesting image. Good eye

[Rhoads238]

Hey William,

I decided to take you up on your offer and had a crack at it



So started with the original panorama with a crop then used auto fill to fill in the blank areas. next I broke the photo down into different groups based on subject and ammounts of light. I put a slight blur at the top of frame to keep the eye focused on the cliff and waterfall. Then I did levels on localized areas to adjust the dark and light areas. I also dodged in some of the darkest areas at the bottom of the waterfall. I also used the dodge tool on the waterfall to give it more texture. Then I increased the vibrance of the shadow area then used hue and saturation to de saturate the bright blue effect that the vibrance adjustment layer caused in the shadow. Next i sharpened the cliff face and shadow area of the basin. Then I sharpened the rocks in the sunlight at the bottom left of the frame but less than the ciff face to stop the texture from becoming too distracting.