Majestic Peace.

[Kathy O]

Rocky Mountain National Park - Estes Park, Colorado USA
Constructive advice is welcome, it is how I learn to take better photos.

[Shadowman]

Hi Kathy,

Nicely captured. Some images are just difficult to deconstruct, they are just what they are. I will say that the sky is in my opinion overly bright and very distracting. The foreground, although very stark works for me as it is identifiable. I would suggest cropping some of the sky leaving just enough whites to keep a nice tonal range.

[Kathy O]

Hi Kathy,

Nicely captured. Some images are just difficult to deconstruct, they are just what they are. I will say that the sky is in my opinion overly bright and very distracting. The foreground, although very stark works for me as it is identifiable. I would suggest cropping some of the sky leaving just enough whites to keep a nice tonal range.

Thank you John Appreciate your input!

[Kathy O]

Hi Kathy,

Nicely captured. Some images are just difficult to deconstruct, they are just what they are. I will say that the sky is in my opinion overly bright and very distracting. The foreground, although very stark works for me as it is identifiable. I would suggest cropping some of the sky leaving just enough whites to keep a nice tonal range.

Is this any better, cropped some sky and took some brightness out of the left side of the sky.

[Wavelength]

This looks majestic as such

[Kathy O]

This looks majestic as such

Thank you

[madcrow]

I like it, good image.

[bnnrcn]

Have you tried convrting the image to B&W Kathy? The colors are not very noticeable and the image looks muddy this way.

[Kathy O]

I like it, good image.

Thank you Maurice

[Kathy O]

Have you tried convrting the image to B&W Kathy? The colors are not very noticeable and the image looks muddy this way.

I will give that a try Thanks for your input

[ccphoto]

Surprisingly to me, and I am a B&W-er from way back, I didn't like it in B&W - - -but I did use a B&W technique to edit the image. Forgive me for working directly on the image but I am not sure you would be able to "see" what I am suggesting, otherwise.

First things first were to knock down the brightest whites. I used Tony Kuypers Luminosity Masks, specifically the Bright Lights mask. These are free plug ins if you use LR or PS.

http://goodlight.us/specialoffers.html

Using the same Lum Masks set, I then applied an extended mid-tones mask to give more definition to the mountains, specifically to lift the mist off the surface a bit.

Again, in the same masking set, I used the Super Darks mask moving the slider more to the left to open up the foreground shadows. I feel like by making the foreground essentially a silhouette, it caused my eye to stop for too long a rest before reentering the image.

For the last part, also Free, Google's NIK pkg. I used Silver Efex Pro2 using the neutral setting and adding control points to the brightest and darkest areas of the images to lighten or darken as needed (mostly in both cases on your image to create a little more conflict between the lighter part of the clouds and the darker storm clouds on the right). To effectively use SEP in this application required at the end for me to change the layer blend to Luminosity, thus bringing it back to color.

The SEP and other Luminosity masks on a 72 dpi file pushed the image toward banding. To offset this tendency, I used the NIK plug-in called Define - Heavy Noise and with a loose edged brush at 100% I worked only the sky. This all sounds really complicated but Tony gives very detailed instructions in their usage.

[Shadowman]

Is this any better, cropped some sky and took some brightness out of the left side of the sky.

Hi Kathy,

Much better. My eyes feel more comfortable as I gaze across the composition.

[Kathy O]

Surprisingly to me, and I am a B&W-er from way back, I didn't like it in B&W - - -but I did use a B&W technique to edit the image. Forgive me for working directly on the image but I am not sure you would be able to "see" what I am suggesting, otherwise.

First things first were to knock down the brightest whites. I used Tony Kuypers Luminosity Masks, specifically the Bright Lights mask. These are free plug ins if you use LR or PS.

http://goodlight.us/specialoffers.html

Using the same Lum Masks set, I then applied an extended mid-tones mask to give more definition to the mountains, specifically to lift the mist off the surface a bit.

Again, in the same masking set, I used the Super Darks mask moving the slider more to the left to open up the foreground shadows. I feel like by making the foreground essentially a silhouette, it caused my eye to stop for too long a rest before reentering the image.

For the last part, also Free, Google's NIK pkg. I used Silver Efex Pro2 using the neutral setting and adding control points to the brightest and darkest areas of the images to lighten or darken as needed (mostly in both cases on your image to create a little more conflict between the lighter part of the clouds and the darker storm clouds on the right). To effectively use SEP in this application required at the end for me to change the layer blend to Luminosity, thus bringing it back to color.

The SEP and other Luminosity masks on a 72 dpi file pushed the image toward banding. To offset this tendency, I used the NIK plug-in called Define - Heavy Noise and with a loose edged brush at 100% I worked only the sky. This all sounds really complicated but Tony gives very detailed instructions in their usage.

Thank you for the great edit, really like the foreground. Would you mind if I saved this edit to my computer?

[ccphoto]

My pleasure for you to do with as you wish.