Please help with new camera and Lightroom

[pasusan]

Seems to me one of the things photographers decide is whether they want an image as close to natural as possible or to make as good an image as possible and not be tied to reality. Usually its a combination of the two.

To me this image is a bit washed out. The hull looks like it should be black. One way to view it is to look at it as a B&W and look at the tone range Or, look at the histogram to see if it spans the range and is not bunched up to once side (unless you want that). Keep posting and asking for advice you will surely get it.

George

Hi George - I agree with you completely. The majority of my images are of nature and my personal preference is to have them look as natural as possible with a little added pop. I definitely don't like to be hit over the head with over-saturation. Thanks for taking the time to work on the image and for your comments.

[pasusan]

Although, of course, I wasn't there, the image looks much more natural to me without the blue cast. In fact, I'm quite surprised that some of the edits seem to have enhanced the blue. It seems likely from my experience that really blue water is the result of a relatively calm surface reflecting a cloudless blue sky, otherwise the water tends towards a mixture of greenish-blue tones.

I do not have Lightroom but ACR might be similar, so the originally posted Jpeg was loaded into ACR via PS Elements, and the following applied - White Balance: Temperature +15, Tint +15; Exposure: +0.33. The image was transferred to Elements and some local contrast then applied (to make the details pop a bit more) using Unsharp Mask: 20%, 50 pixels, 0 levels.


Philip

Hi Philip - I do like your version of the image a lot better than my last one. So, thanks very much for taking the time to work on it and give me your workflow! I think I can do in LR something similar to what you did with PSE.


And as a side note... I went on a field trip yesterday and shot only in RAW! I dove in head first.
Boy, do those images need some major work...