Evening Thunderhead

[Marie Hass]

To me, while this is nice, it is still a fail. Please help me understand what I did so I can take a better image next time.

This is my take. ISO, while set at 800, shows noise despite processing in RAW to control. The cloud was building so quickly that I was unable to get a faster shutter speed without the image becoming too dark. Nothing in the foreground to catch attention. And so on.



Marie

[Shadowman]

I like the cloud formation and the noise can be controlled with the right software. The land lends very little to the image, perhaps if there were flecks of light on the peaks and more detail within the land mass it would help, but to me the subject of this image is the clouds so concentrate on them.

[Brownbear]

Hi Marie,

Beautiful cloud! I love photographing clouds and they always look best at lower ISOs, which for me is 100-400 max (for clouds seen in full size images with no noise) even if it means the foreground goes dark and especially so if it is a gorgeous cloud like this one.. ie; its all about the cloud. (for me anyway)

[bnnrcn]

The image is nice Marie I would try to improve it with PP. If you use PS, try 'overlay' blending mode to make the colours stronger and then brighten the land selectively with levels. Just an idea

[Geoff F]

It is one of those scenes which are virtually impossible to fully capture in one shot, Marie. And multiple HDR shots often fail because the cloud shape is changing so quickly.

About all you can do is to expose for the bright areas and try to recover the darker tones during processing.

Possibly, try slightly darkening the shadows. But you might need to do this with an adjustment layer and a suitably edited mask to selectively apply the effect.

A little bit of LCE or an adjustment layer with the blend mode on something like Soft Light might be worth trying as an alternative. But in each case, I would probably use a mask to limit the effect.

For dealing with shadow noise, I often run over the problem area with a light soft edged blur brush. Alternatively I limit where noise reduction is applied by placing a selection around the problems.