Waterfall

[kirupakaran]

Hello Experts,

I recently shot a waterfall picture, need your guidance on how to improve this shot.


If you notice carefully, to the left bottom corner there is a small water stream flowing through the rocks. When I took this picture, to my naked eye or through viewfinder, the water stream was very clear but could not get the same clarity on this picture. How I should have got this?

thanks
Krupa

[James G]

Hi Krupa,
Is this image as shot, or have you already applied any processing to it?

The link below takes you to my Dropbox site and has two files. One is a copy of your image. The second is a version I have applied some PS6 processing to.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/fncrtwczh4wvyvn/3nG-OPYZs2 (you may need to copy and paste this link into your browser directly)

I used Photoshop CS6 and the processing steps were -
a) adjust the white and black points in the image (using levels)
b) applied a little additional vibrance
c) slightly increased overall brightness and reduced contrast to avoid blowing whites,

These are just the basic changes I would apply, and normally I would make these changes to the RAW capture using Adobe ACR and then further process in CS6 for resizing, sharpening etc prior to print. Does this give you more of what you hoped for.

:-)
James

[Geoff F]

Simple quick edit, Krupa.



Just increased the highlights slightly, but fractionally reduced the blue channel. And a little sharpen.

There are a few other options to further increase the contrast, such as Local Contrast Enhancement. But I thought this was probably one of those cases where it would be easy to overdo the 'enhancements'.

But selectively applying some LCE to the water etc may be worth a try.

[Sahil]

Wow.. Such force in that water. Makes me feel giddy...

[Geoff F]

And with a little bit of Local Contrast Enhancement selectively added.



Overall LCE produced a few problems, like overdone highlights and noise. So I created a duplicate layer then applied Unsharp Mask to the layer (amount 30, radius 40, threshold 1).

Next a 'hide all mask' over the duplicate layer. Which 'hid' the effects. Painting over the required areas with a low opacity soft edged 'white brush' enabled the LCE effect to gradually and selectively appear. Mostly over the cascading water and bottom left corner, but with less effect on any potential highlight hotspots.

However, this method does assume the user has suitable software; plus a tiny bit of expertise in these methods.

Whether it is worth the extra work (but not a lot extra) is probably a matter of opinion.

[kirupakaran]

Thanks Geoff & James
Will try this out,

thanks
Krupa