River Dee

[David]

I would welcome comments on the following image. Apart from sharpening, the image is as shot using my Canon 40D with EF24-105 lens.




The photograph was taken about 3 pm on a late December day, with the Scottish Sun already very low.

David

[CNelson]

David: I like it. It has a cold but peaceful look/feel. Have you tried to coach some color out of the image to see if it adds or detracts? Alternatively you might convert it to black and white and play with the contrast to see what you get.

It's a fine picture as it is but there may be something more there.

This would likely be a good shot for HDR. If you shot this in RAW format you might try for a pseudo HDR to see what you get.

Chuck

[crisscross]

Yes David, especially the sky is way over-exposed and not too much colour in anything else, so try negative exposure compensation and upping saturation as far as you can without it turning into a tea towel design. Personally I don't mind some stuff, especially trees, going into silhouette

[Colin Southern]

I agree with other comments so far.

Although reflection type shots often allow one to break the rule-of-thirds and centre things, often they look better if there's something in the foreground as well.

To me the image looks a bit flat - needs a bit of sharpening - and unfortunately (as already mentioned) the sky is over-exposed, so unfortunately little chance of coaxing more detail out if it.

Hope you don't mind, but I had a quick play with it for a bit of an "alternate interpretation" - I raised the black clipping point to give it more contrast, scaled back the highlights (so it looked a touch more "natural gray" rather than "blown highlight white" - changed the aspect ratio - and sharpened it up a little. Probably more could be extracted, but here goes ...



Hope this helps!

[milleniummuppet]

The greyscale version definitely enhances the image.
Kind of brings out a 'cold' theme, a bit like winter really.
If this was not the intent, I would certainly say that it needs more colour AND contrast.
Try pushing the contrast up first before adding colour, that way you will be able to see just how much is needed.
Of course I could be interpreting this image entirely wrong, so see what you think.

[shreds]

I agree that going for the b/w look is definitely an improvement in my eyes. The original suffers from being a typical Scottish grey day and losing the colour altogether creates a much stronger image.

[David]

Hi All - Thanks for the comments; some considerable food for thought. I did try a B/W version, as some have suggested, but got nothing like Colin has achieved. So, I'm going to see if I can emulate that image myself. I'm also going to try the opposite route and put more saturation and/or contrast into it.

One thing that puzzles me about images that are posted here, and indeed elsewhere, is how do you and I know what you are seeing is what I am seeing (if you follow me)? The reason that I ask this is because on my monitor, the sky has definite blue and yellowish areas that I thought reasonably complemented the dark trees.

If I make anything I think is better, I'll re-post.

Thanks again.

David

[crisscross]

One thing that puzzles me about images that are posted here, and indeed elsewhere, is how do you and I know what you are seeing is what I am seeing (if you follow me)? The reason that I ask this is because on my monitor, the sky has definite blue and yellowish areas that I thought reasonably complemented the dark trees.
David

This is an eternal hazard of web viewing. I can see some pale blue in sky (and more in reflection which always has a lower exposure), which is what encourages me to say lower EV if it is a RAW image. But no yellow (even if squeezed elsewhere), maybe because my set up is for Adobe RGB on a calibrated monitor (see sep threads) whereas with an sRGB set up (or monitor biassed to yellow) the colour is cruder. One day browsers will all (even MS ones ) be brought into 21st century to match the quality of our sensors and all flaky monitors will have been binned.

Chris

[David]

Hi Guys - Following your helpful comments I've reworked the image:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3202/...cff1dac3_b.jpg

(The image will not post directly to this site, but the link works.)

I tried various greyscale versions, but they were not correct to my eye. The pale blue and yellow features in the sky were partly what attracted me to this scene. Thus, I've adopted Chris's suggestion of reducing the exposure and enhancing saturation. In addition, I've followed Colin's change of format and increased sharpness via two mild passes of a high pass filter that I use.

I think the image is better and more to what I felt/saw at the time. In particular, I think there is now an element of "ariel perspective" in that the distant hills are a shade of blue.

Thanks again for your help and further comments are welcome.

David

[crisscross]

Wow - justification for shooting RAW in one quick demo!

....but if you are clever enough to do that David, you could aslo possibly try fading the middle ground so the trees stand out a bit better from it? And finally to confuse things totally, are you sure the unsharp & high pass are not being counter-productive? They can create a halo effect that detracts from the solidity of twiggery which is very important here & not sure if needs to be particularly sharp

Chris

[Colin Southern]

Hi David,

Quick question - just wondering why the clouds reflected in the foreground appear to bear no resemblance to the ones above the trees?

[milleniummuppet]

WOW!
Something sways me to like that image better .

[iPhillip]

Hi David,

Quick question - just wondering why the clouds reflected in the foreground appear to bear no resemblance to the ones above the trees?

Cheers

They actually do, if you look at the picture you can see that the big body of clouds we see above is actually behind the trees in the reflection. The extra clouds we see are actually just above the others, and we only see them in the reflection.

[David]

Hi Guys - Thanks for the extra comments. It looks like my reworking has produced a better image (a two WOW image!).

Re Colin's comment about the cloud reflections- I think iPhillip has summed it up. Much of what you see in the foreground is not in the sky of the photo. Thus, the reflection is different.

Re Chris and fading/sharpening - I've added that to my to do list.

One other point for Canon shooters that I forgot in the last post is that the original image was produced from the RAW file using Canon's DPP software whereas the reworked image used UfRaw (I.e. DCRaw for the GIMP). I found there to be better control of exposure and saturation using this system. I think that this is an example of where the third party software has an advantage over the Canon suite.

Cheers

David

[atvinnys]

David,

got to say that the final result is really much better than the original.
Good work!

Vincent