Fading Light

[GBO25]

I shot this at low tide on an afternoon which I though had almost the perfect sunset to highlight the boat. Fortunately it had drifted to an almost ideal position as the tide receded. I have no idea what caused the ring of water around it but it sure made a great frame. At least I thought so.
The black and white image is posted elsewhere but I thought I'd include the original for comparison. C/C welcome.

[terrib]

Both very nice. Great composition and the cloud formation and the ring of water do make it stand out. I like the color version more but that's not surprising as I usually prefer color.

[Shadowman]

Nice images.

[IzzieK]

I am with Terri here. I like the colour version because it shows more of the real time when you took the shot, the sunset hitting the side of the boat and the reflection of the sunlight hitting the water--it is a work of art in itself. The B/W is not messy at all. In fact, the more I look I like, the more I get to like it too. Maybe you should ignore this last sentence as I am not really good in B/W but I like what I am seeing here. Different...

[bnnrcn]

Both very nice, I can't choose which one is better

[GBO25]

Thanks for the comments. It's made me look more critically at the images to see which one I would seriously prefer and I may end up my own worst critic but as I looked at them I saw several things that need changing.
A. The horizon is either not quite level or slightly distorted from the wider angle lens (15mm) or a bit of both.
B. There is a dust spot obvious on the right side edge that should be edited out.
C. The ring of light around the boat has a large gap to the image border on the left but is right up to the border on the right.
I might crop it in from the right to make the ring of water more uniform which will get rid of that dust spot as well then have a fiddle with the horizon. I'll have to do a few other adjustments though because I think cropping it in on one side will upset the vignette at the top of the shot.....sigh, should have been more careful when I composed it in the first place.

[bnnrcn]

Graham, as far as I can see the dust spot is on the left, not on the right. If you don't want to crop the image you can simply clone it out. If you want to crop, you can remove the vignette before cropping and add it again after cropping so that the vignette doesn't get upset . I didn't even notice the horizon issue before you mentioned it , because the movement of clouds is downwards. And because of the boat and some very near clouds, it is impossible to see the full horizon anyway. If it was my image I wouldn't bother myself for the horizon at all

[HaseebM]

Both are outstanding, very hard to pick which one is better.

[JohnRostron]

I usually prefer colour, but in this case, I prefer the Black & White!

[Ndukes]

I think the B&W works best. The flow in the clouds, more prominent in the B&W, dances with the tilt of the boat. More harmonic composition I think. Both present a very nice atmosphere. Nice work.

[GBO25]

Graham, as far as I can see the dust spot is on the left, not on the right. ............If you want to crop, you can remove the vignette before cropping and add it again after cropping so that the vignette doesn't get upset. ...........

You're correct Binnur, the spot is on the left & that's what I meant to write; must be dyslexia.
The vignette was caused by the wide angle lens and not introduced in PP so it will take some time to get it looking right after a crop I think.

[GBO25]

OK, I levelled the horizon then used the Recompose tool in PS Elements to selectively remove the area of beach to the left of the boat while keeping the vignette at the top of the image reasonably untouched. I also cloned out the dust spot but it was pretty much removed by the recomposition anyway.

[Rebel]

Both stunning images, I can't decide between them. Good work

[John 2]

Thought I had commented on this already Graham. I must have forgotten to press the right button. What makes this image for me is the sky and the mono version makes more of it than the colour. So as they stand, it's the mono for me but I have a feeling that you could select the sky in the colour version and take the mid tones down a bit (levels) and achieve the same definition between the clouds and the blue to achieve the same result. Either way, two very fine images.

[GBO25]

Thanks everyone for your comments and suggestions. And John I'll have a go at adjusting midtone levels although I probably won't post the result.

[Polar01]

Graham a very strong image both of them. I see that you are a newer member in November using PS Elements not sure of the version, you have done a good job on both the colour and the conversion to B&W. I feel that the B&W is the stronger of the two images. To me the boat is the story the main point of interest, the sky and sun are strong elements, and foreground is good (in a way), but how to we bring the boat to life. That involves three things most important the shooter's vision, how well the shooter knows there camera gear, what they can get out of their post production program.
Camera gear first, this is a high dynamic range shot, so a number of images at different exposures would work. The use of GND filters say a 2 or a 3-stop soft grad on the top would allow the shadows to be opened up 2 to 3 stops (foreground and boat). Knowing that if the back of you camera is showing the blinkies that you still have 1 or 2 stops in post before the highlights are blown. and most important shooting it in raw so that you can gather as much data as possible for post.
Now post production, the bracketed shots can be done different ways, stack the images, then using masks and blending modes create the final image, auto blending programs (photomatix), or PS elements HDR blend program save as Tiff close then reopen Tiff back into Elements' raw converter and rework, before sending it to elements.
Straight post production does not have to be difficult or hard learn what you need to know to get you vision. Your raw converter does not matter if it is Elements', LR's or Photoshop's ACR it does all the heavy lifting (where most of the magic happens), after the converter it is only a matter of how much sanding and polish you apply.
I played with your image to see if I could bring it to my vision, if you do not approve let me know and I will remove the post.
This is what I did, opened in Photoshop CC's ACR, very little clipping in highlight to worry about, however a lot in the shadows. First used adjustment brush to drop sky 4 stops, then tried to increase exposure overall to remove some of clipping in shadows, did not work, I found that increasing the contrast, highlights, whites, shadows and blacks (that is moving all those sliders to the right) gave me the best results. Now in Photoshop to polish, added a curves adjustment layer with inverted mask to only reveal what I wanted, and also a levels with inverted mask again revealing only what I wanted.
This is the vision that the captured image took me, it likely is not your vision or maybe it is somewhere near to what you wanted but not sure how to get to. Anyway I hope it meets your approval.

Cheers: Allan

[GBO25]

.....I played with your image to see if I could bring it to my vision, if you do not approve let me know and I will remove the post.
Anyway I hope it meets your approval.

Cheers: Allan

I don't mind you having a bit more of an adjustment Alan. This was shot with a Canon 600D and an EF-S 15-85 lens at 15mm then processed in Elements 10 for Mac.
Although I like some aspects of the additional processing to my eye it's beginning to look unreal, as if it's had a little too much work. I realise that you were constrained by the fact you only had a small jpeg image to work with rather than the original full size Raw and that certainly wouldn't make it easy.

What I did do was pull your processed image in on top of mine as a new layer and reduced the opacity of the layer to 50%. Then I used an inverted mask and trimmed it so that only the boat and the foreground that lay outside the ring of water were reduced by that 50%. Then I flattened the layers, dragged your image in again as another new layer, reduced the opacity to 32% this time and masked out the boat and foreground outside the ring of water.

So in the end I effectively reduced your edits by 68% for the sky and area around the boat and by 50% for the boat and area outside the ring of water and ended up with something better than what I originally had and more pleasing to my eye.

I don't have any ND grad filters and do my raw processing mostly in the version of ACR that comes with PS Elements. In the last week or so I've upgraded to Elements 13 which has improved adjustments over the ACR version that came with Elements 10. Taking a couple of shots with exposure bracketing and blending them later is something I should have done. Isn't hindsight wonderful

Cheers
Graham