The Ozarks

[Evertking]

1.
calicorock by James Cason, on Flickr

2.
IMG_4606 by James Cason, on Flickr

3.
IMG_4539 by James Cason, on Flickr

4.
IMG_4513 by James Cason, on Flickr

5.
IMG_4545jjj by James Cason, on Flickr

[pschlute]

Lovely set.

[Manfred M]

A nice landscape set. I especially like #2, although a bit more space along the top would be nice.

You really need to learn how to dodge and burn to unlock these captures; they have great potential, but they need to be opened up a bit more except for #1 where the highlights need to come down a bit as well.

This may not be to your taste, but I just wanted to give you an idea of where you could go with this image to bring out some of the detail I was referring to. I spent about 15 minutes, mostly dodging and burning, but also straightened the walls and played with the saturation and mid-tone contrast a bit. My style is heavily influenced by contemporary fine art retouching and printing.

[Wavelength]

What a captivating collection of images....

[Evertking]

A nice landscape set. I especially like #2, although a bit more space along the top would be nice.

You really need to learn how to dodge and burn to unlock these captures; they have great potential, but they need to be opened up a bit more except for #1 where the highlights need to come down a bit as well.

This may not be to your taste, but I just wanted to give you an idea of where you could go with this image to bring out some of the detail I was referring to. I spent about 15 minutes, mostly dodging and burning, but also straightened the walls and played with the saturation and mid-tone contrast a bit. My style is heavily influenced by contemporary fine art retouching and printing.

When it comes to D&B I'm not sure where or what to D&B
Thanks

[DanK]

A very nice series.

Dodging and burning refer to lightening or darkening specific areas. The terminology comes from the old wet-darkroom days: dodging the light from the enlarger, often with a little piece of cardboard, lightened the print, and exposing an area longer darkened it.

As an example, I started dodging the green areas in your last photo, which I think has a great deal of potential. I would either go in this direction or play with turning those areas even darker for a silhouette:



In #4 and to a lesser degree #2, you have a problem a color cast problem, with a yellow-green tint. This has been an issue (for me, anyway) in a number of your earlier postings. For example, just a quick tweak of white balance in #4--not a good edit, but just an illustration--yields this:

[Manfred M]

When it comes to D&B I'm not sure where or what to D&B
Thanks

Just to add to Dan's comments.

Areas of the image that appear to be too bright can be darkened a bit. This local adjustment is referred to as burning.

Areas (especially in shaded areas) that are too dark need to be brightened a bit to open them up. This is referred to as dodging.

There are numerous tools you can use do to this, depending on the software you are using. If you chat with people that retouch images for a living, this is their bread and butter. I would say well over 90% of their time is spent with just these two operations.