Going dark or bright?

[acsky]

Hi

I tried to avoid having the trees too dark, since they occupy a large part of the image. I don't want to see a black image with a little bit of sky.

What are your thoughts on it?

Toño

[ronlane]

What are you post processing with? If it's lightroom or photoshop, you could brighten up the picture and then use a graduated filter to darken the sky back to this level. Or use a layer to brighten just the trees and below.

Personlly, this is what I would have done to try to pull out as much detail and color in the trees and ground.

But that would not work if you were wanting a sillouette of the landscape.

[Andrew76]

One of the magnificent additions to LR4 are the 'Highlights' and 'Shadows' sliders under the Basic menu.

I agree with what you're saying Toño, and since the detail in the trees is not totally lost, the shadows slider works miracles. You can even bring back some depth, and detail to those clouds by dropping down the highlights too.

Not sure if that helps you or not, but I thought I'd try.

[LeoLeo]

Hi Toño

Not sure exactly what you are aiming for, but I will give my try.
If you are working with simetry/reflection, I hope to have them "equal" in picture frame. Also, the right bottom corner is a bit distracting. Everything temp to be simetrical, but this one doesn't have a counter part.

As technical suggestion: in this very high dinamic range, try to expost to the right (ETTR), like follows:
1. Use manual mode
2. Use spot mettering, and do your evaluation in the most bright area in your frame (i.e. those white lighted clouds)
3. Set this area as +2, from "normal mettering" ( I do not think you have +3 on your Rebel T3i, but put on +3 if you have it)
4. Reframe and shoot

If you shoot raw, you will have arround +/- 9EV, and will allow you to render your image both in lighter or darker side

Hope it helps,
Leo

[acsky]

Thanks for your reply.

Ron. I'm using GIMP. Probably lightroom is easier to use, but I'm still sticking to GIMP.

Andrew. Below is the image as shot. For some reason I forgot to change the exposure compensation and it was on -1 and the image came out a little dark.

Shot in RAW, using Evaluative Metering. 1/1600s F9.0.

What I did was to save a brighter and a darker version of the image, and apply a mask to have the bottom brighter and to have some contrast on the sky.



My goal was to have a nice and bright colour on the reflections, but that lead to have a pale and flat sky. Therefore I applied the layer, I think it was with 25% opacity since I don't want it to look fake. I'd like to have a little deeper blue on the sky, but then the difference against the reflection would look awkward.

Leo. I DO have +3 on the T3i. Thanks for the tip. I'll try it next time =)

[Andrew76]

Toño, I hope you don't mind that I took the liberty of giving your photo a try myself? If you do, please feel free to remove it. Also, please take note that this was a quick, and dirty edit job. The photo I got from you, was less than 500kb, so this is by no means a professional edit job - if it looks noisy, or grainy, it's an image size issue, and nothing that I have done.

I'm not sure if this is the look you were going for, but I brightened up the reflections in the water, and managed to keep the sky reasonably vibrant. I was also able to retrieve quite a bit of detail in the trees, and buildings. This entire edit was achieved with only a couple sliders in LR4, and no layers/masks etc.

Please let me know what you think.