At the creek

[Evertking]

Cc please.

[Shadowman]

Nice shot, a little tight on the crop above her head though.

[Rufus]

I like the interesting environment which helps retain my attention as the face is not visible.

I agree that a litle more hardroom would have been nice to have.

To my untrained eye there appears to be a colour cast to the image even in Lightbox, but it might be me or my screen.

[DanK]

I think there is too much negative space behind her, and the detail on the right draws the eye away from her. I'd crop from the right. Often--although I don't want to imply a "rule"--it works better to place more of the empty space in front of the subject.

I see the color cast as well, viewing on a calibrated monitor. It's yellowish, but I haven't played around enough with it to know whether it is just the yellow-blue axis. I think I've seen this in many of your images before. Is this intentional? If it isn't, there are numerous possible sources: an incorrect WB setting in the camera that isn't corrected in post, an uncalibrated monitor, or a bad neutral target. Re the first: some people deliberately use too high (numerically high) a WB setting in order to create a warm tone that they prefer even though it isn't quite accurate.

If you don't want this tone, I'd recommend shooting one test shot in each sequence, under the same lighting, with a good neutral card, like a whiBal. I sometimes ask someone to hold one for me and use the shot of that person to figure out a neutral WB for that particular lighting. I then adjust to taste, apply to the other photos in the sequence, and make any adjustments to the other photos. If you use LR, it's trivially easy: put the eyedropper in the WB section on the card, adjust, and then synch the WB setting to the rest of the photos.

[Manfred M]

You seem to be adding these warm tones to a lot of the images that you post here so I suspect it is on purpose. Unfortunately, you are using the members here as "sounding board" and rarely respond to their comments, so it makes it difficult for us to understand what you are trying to do. This would be helpful to you as we could target the comments better:

1. The image looks underexposed;

2. The colour cast is intrusive (it doesn't look like a colour grade, even though that might be what you are trying to achieve); and

3. To quote the late Robert Capa; "If your image isn't goo enough, you're not close enough". There is too much material in the shot that does not contribute to the overall image.

4. Get rid of the reflection of the skirt in the water; it is a distraction that draw's the viewer's eye out of the frame.

[xpatUSA]

You seem to be adding these warm tones to a lot of the images that you post here so I suspect it is on purpose. Unfortunately, you are using the members here as "sounding board" and rarely respond to their comments, so it makes it difficult for us to understand what you are trying to do. This would be helpful to you as we could target the comments better:

1. The image looks underexposed;

2. The colour cast is intrusive (it doesn't look like a colour grade, even though that might be what you are trying to achieve); and

3. To quote the late Robert Capa; "If your image isn't goo enough, you're not close enough". There is too much material in the shot that does not contribute to the overall image.

4. Get rid of the reflection of the skirt in the water; it is a distraction that draw's the viewer's eye out of the frame.

To which I would add that posting a PNG image doesn't help our comments either:



Perhaps 'Adobe ImageReady' (whatever that is) had an effect, although the primary and white reference tag values are indeed correct for sRGB. What I don't know is if a color-managed system uses them ...

[DanK]

I'm back at my main machine, so I tried some quick edits. You haven't said what your intent was, so I suspect this is not at all what you would want, but it illustrates some of the suggestions above. PM me if you object to edits, and I'll take it down.

1. I brightened the image, while leaving it slightly on the dark side. I pulled the whites down so that the sweater wouldn't stand out so much.

2. I changed the white balance, making it much closer to neutral but leaving it somewhat on the warm side, using the sweater as a neutral target (Lightroom adjustment on the blue-yellow axis = -20).

3. I cropped a lot on the right and a bit on the bottom.

4. I sharpened the image a bit (in Lightroom, radius 1, amount 30, no masking).

[rpcrowe]

This is the way I played with the image before I read any of the critiques...



Besides cropping, I played with the brightness a bit, softened the image a TAD and desaturated it...

[Manfred M]

Time to throw my edit into the mix. I used Content Aware Fill to add a bit of headroom and used a warm colour grade after neutralizing the colour cast.

[Manfred M]

To which I would add that posting a PNG image doesn't help our comments either:



Perhaps 'Adobe ImageReady' (whatever that is) had an effect, although the primary and white reference tag values are indeed correct for sRGB. What I don't know is if a color-managed system uses them ...

ImageReady was part of Photoshop when I first started using it (that would have been Photoshop CS, which came out in 2003). It hasn't been around for a very long time (at least a decade). I suspect it might have been around before then. It was primarily a tool to get images ready for use on websites. I'm not sure if this either indicates a very old version of Photoshop is being used or if this is just due to a bug somewhere.

I'm not quite sure why a PNG file is any more difficult to analyze than a JPEG.

The moment someone crops and edits an image, the original EXIF data becomes considerably less useful.

[Evertking]

Thanks very much. And I do appreciate all the help and advice. I'm not a big internet person so I'm not always on here. I have learned so much from this fourm. One guy, I wish I could remember his name, taught me some things I use and think about Everytime I go out. I look around the frame before I ever push the shutter button.
I thought the crop wouldn't work, needs more headroom. I also set her on one third and the rock on the other.. guess I could let the rule of 3rds go sometimes. To the color cast, I had a guy tell me one time to set my camera to 5500k and leave it. That's where it's set ever since and this image was my attempt at color grading but it sounds like it didn't work.
I have a 100 or so shots from this day and will just try again.
Thanks for all the help and advice.

[DanK]

I had a guy tell me one time to set my camera to 5500k and leave it. That's where it's set ever since

I wouldn't take any more advice from that guy, unless you want to ignore the camera's attempt at white balance and simply impose your own.

I do sometimes set the camera for a fixed color temperature when I know it will be wrong. This is often handy when doing night photography; one doesn't want the camera compensating for blue tones during blue hour, for example. However, that's with the assumption that I will have to impose my own choice of WB later. As I only shoot raw, it doesn't much matter what the camera is set for; that tells the software where to start but has no actual effect on the image data.

[xpatUSA]

ImageReady was part of Photoshop when I first started using it (that would have been Photoshop CS, which came out in 2003). It hasn't been around for a very long time (at least a decade). I suspect it might have been around before then. It was primarily a tool to get images ready for use on websites. I'm not sure if this either indicates a very old version of Photoshop is being used or if this is just due to a bug somewhere.

Thanks for the info; I'd never heard of it.

I'm not quite sure why a PNG file is any more difficult to analyze than a JPEG.

The moment someone crops and edits an image, the original EXIF data becomes considerably less useful.

You may have a point. In the PNG meta-data, the white reference is D65 and yet the OP said he always shoots at 5500K on advice from from somebody or other. In the absence of color-balance editing, how would a shot taken at D55 but rendered at D65 look; warmer or colder?

[xpatUSA]

I do sometimes set the camera for a fixed color temperature when I know it will be wrong. This is often handy when doing night photography; one doesn't want the camera compensating for blue tones during blue hour, for example. However, that's with the assumption that I will have to impose my own choice of WB later. As I only shoot raw, it doesn't much matter what [WB] the camera is set for ...

... unless we take any notice of the camera's LCD rendering which, in many cameras, does reflect the selected WB.

[Manfred M]

To the color cast, I had a guy tell me one time to set my camera to 5500k and leave it. That's where it's set ever since and this image was my attempt at color grading but it sounds like it didn't work.

I know one internationally respected landscape photographer who does that (actually he uses 5000K) BUT he does so primarily so that he has a common baseline for all his shots. His rationale is that in the film days, the films he used were colour balanced at 5000K.

He does much of his shooting at blue hour and just at sunrise (and sunset). The auto-white balance does not work at those colour temperatures (on my camera the working range is 3500K - 8000K). That being said, he is a RAW shooter and then colour balances in Adobe Camera Raw before processing in Photoshop (he's another one of those Photoshop CS6 users).

So, there is nothing at all wrong with shooting at the same white balance setting, so long as you are shooting raw and correct in post.

[xpatUSA]

I know one internationally respected landscape photographer who does that (actually he uses 5000K) BUT he does so primarily so that he has a common baseline for all his shots. His rationale is that in the film days, the films he used were colour balanced at 5000K.

He does much of his shooting at blue hour and just at sunrise (and sunset). The auto-white balance does not work at those colour temperatures (on my camera the working range is 3500K - 8000K). That being said, he is a RAW shooter and then colour balances in Adobe Camera Raw before processing in Photoshop (he's another one of those Photoshop CS6 users).

So, there is nothing at all wrong with shooting at the same white balance setting, so long as you are shooting raw and correct in post ...

... unless we take any notice of the camera's LCD rendering which, in many cameras, does reflect the selected WB.

I did try UNIWB for a while ...

http://www.guillermoluijk.com/tutori...b/index_en.htm

[DanK]

... unless we take any notice of the camera's LCD rendering which, in many cameras, does reflect the selected WB.

yes, it does determine the initial rendering, but that doesn't have any practical implications at all, if one assumes that the WB has to be set in post.

For everyday outdoor shooting, I find that the AWB in my Canons usually comes fairly close. I still consider it only a starting point, but it is convenient, and it often comes closer than a fixed Kelvin value would.

[Round Tuit]

Manfred, would you mind explaining what you did to create the colour grading that you applied to the picture. Whenever I try this, I end up with a usually ugly colour cast

I find it interesting that three of you came up with essentially the same crop and the same exposure correction. While I agree that the result is a much stronger picture of the young girl, it also completely changed the mood of the picture. In Mike's original shot, she looks much more vulnerable and absorbed in her thoughts. In the "corrected" version, she looks like a kid playing in the water.

[DanK]

In Mike's original shot, she looks much more vulnerable and absorbed in her thoughts. In the "corrected" version, she looks like a kid playing in the water.

This is a very interesting observation. I agree that the mood is different and have to think more about why. One reason is probably the underexposure in the original, which makes the girl stand out less. however, I think the main reason is the loss of all of the detail on the right. This had two effects: it made the girl much larger, and it removed context.

This seems like a bind, given the original composition. IMHO, the detail in the original was in the wrong place and was quite distracting.

[Manfred M]

Manfred, would you mind explaining what you did to create the colour grading that you applied to the picture. Whenever I try this, I end up with a usually ugly colour cast

The easiest way to colour grade is to use Color Lookup; either as an adjustment layer (my preferred workflow) or as an adjustment on the image itself.

I always start with a properly colour corrected image; grading primarily involves specific adjustments to the highlights, mid-tones and shadow areas. I find that the 3DLUT option has the most "looks" and I usually find what i want there. I tend to take down the opacity and will sometimes use a blending mode other than Normal.

The reason I tend to go the layer mask route is that I will paint areas to decrease the effect here hand there, especially in the skin areas.

I find it interesting that three of you came up with essentially the same crop and the same exposure correction. While I agree that the result is a much stronger picture of the young girl, it also completely changed the mood of the picture. In Mike's original shot, she looks much more vulnerable and absorbed in her thoughts. In the "corrected" version, she looks like a kid playing in the water.

Yes it changes the look, but as Dan has pointed out, we don't have a lot of choice here as the original composition is not working all that well for the reasons he has given. Unfortunately, we are not in a position to re-shoot, so an edit that crops away part of the image that is not working is often all one can do. The problem I have with the original is the focus is on a part of the scene that doesn't contribute to the image and in fact it detracts. The reason I went for a tighter crop than either Dan or Richard is that I found that the background's softness was distracting too much from the subject so I wanted less of it. Had she been turned in the opposite direction, the main crop would have been on the left hand side and the area on the right hand side would have played a bigger role in the composition.