Battlefield sunset

[tybrad]

Taken at Gettysburg, nearly sundown behind a monument. No post-process other than cropping- the sky was great at that moment.

[DanK]

An interesting shot and a very good capture.

If it were mine, I'd crop a little from the top to avoid drawing attention away from the silhouette.

No post-process other than cropping

Did you mean that you shot JPEG, or that you shot raw, let software render it, and left the original rendering alone? Not to be a pendant, but either way, there's postprocessing, just postprocessing left to whoever designed either the in-camera processing algorithms or the rendering code in the raw processor rather than done by you. You can see the former by changing picture styles in the camera, and you can see the latter, if you use Lightroom or ACR, by changing the rendering profile.

[tybrad]

Thank you, Dan.
I guess that I assumed everyone knows what I meant about processing since we cannot upload RAWs.
Post-processing done by me. This was a large/fine jpeg in my D7000

[Manfred M]

I initially thought this was a B&W image until I noticed a bit of blue in the sky. I agree with Dan here that there is too much sky that is not really contributing to the composition.

I'm also not loving the balance if the shot; it is heavily weighted to the bottom right corner. I wonder if opening up the shadows to reveal the textures here (push the Shadows slider hard to the right in the raw convertor) might be a solution here, unless you really want that silhouette effect.

[Geoff F]

I am tempted to lose a little from the bottom, to reduce the amount of blackness, and leave the sky as it is now; or perhaps just a fraction off the top.

[tybrad]

I initially thought this was a B&W image until I noticed a bit of blue in the sky. I agree with Dan here that there is too much sky that is not really contributing to the composition.

I'm also not loving the balance if the shot; it is heavily weighted to the bottom right corner. I wonder if opening up the shadows to reveal the textures here (push the Shadows slider hard to the right in the raw convertor) might be a solution here, unless you really want that silhouette effect.

Hi Manfred.
I was indeed after the silhouette.
I would have preferred to have the statue further left, but then the tall column that it is associated with would show, and be cut off. It's there in my original image but I purposefully j-u-s-t cropped it out.

[tybrad]

I am tempted to lose a little from the bottom, to reduce the amount of blackness, and leave the sky as it is now; or perhaps just a fraction off the top.

Yep- I was thinking about all of that when cropping. However, I felt that the sky was 70% primary in this image and did not want to crop that down/out much at all. As well, I wanted to maintain the aspect ratio.

[tybrad]

Here is the original. Let me see what your edit would look like.

[DanK]

It's all a matter of taste, but perhaps something along the lines of this:



I increased contrast in the sky slightly as well as cropping.

You said that there is no postprocessing other than cropping, but there is a distinct halo along the black edge, which is often a sign of oversharpening.

[tybrad]

Thanks, Dan. Looks good but I still do not like the column there. But you did well in eliminating the capital!

All sharpening was done in-camera... it was set to max before I really understood digital artifacts.
I have since lowered that value for just this reason.

[DanK]

Thanks, Dan. Looks good but I still do not like the column there. But you did well in eliminating the capital!

All sharpening was done in-camera... it was set to max before I really understood digital artifacts.
I have since lowered that value for just this reason.

I'm still confused about how you shot this. If you shot JPEG, then whatever sharpening setting you used in the camera is baked into the file, and there is nothing you can do about it. All of the postprocessing involved in whatever picture style you used--typically, sharpening, contrast, saturation, and color balance--is performed by the camera and is baked into the file.

If you shot raw, nothing you set on the camera other than exposure is baked into the file. I'm not familiar with the software you are using, but some raw-file rendering software will read from EXIF what camera settings you had and will impose them in the initial rendering. However, when that happens, you can undo it, as it's still not baked into the file.

Earlier you wrote:

Post-processing done by me. This was a large/fine jpeg in my D7000

Those two sentences are inconsistent. if you shot JPEG, then a lot of postprocessing was necessarily done by the camera. I think what you mean might be "I didn't do much postprocessing in addition to that done by the camera". But as you can see from the sharpening issue, the camera did a lot.

You note that you can't post raw files. Much of what you see here are raw captures that the photographers edit entirely themselves and then export or save as JPEGs in order to post them.

[tybrad]

I'm still confused about how you shot this. If you shot JPEG, then whatever sharpening setting you used in the camera is baked into the file, and there is nothing you can do about it. All of the postprocessing involved in whatever picture style you used--typically, sharpening, contrast, saturation, and color balance--is performed by the camera and is baked into the file.

If you shot raw, nothing you set on the camera other than exposure is baked into the file. I'm not familiar with the software you are using, but some raw-file rendering software will read from EXIF what camera settings you had and will impose them in the initial rendering. However, when that happens, you can undo it, as it's still not baked into the file.


Earlier you wrote:


Those two sentences are inconsistent. if you shot JPEG, then a lot of postprocessing was necessarily done by the camera. I think what you mean might be "I didn't do much postprocessing in addition to that done by the camera". But as you can see from the sharpening issue, the camera did a lot.

You note that you can't post raw files. Much of what you see here are raw captures that the photographers edit entirely themselves and then export or save as JPEGs in order to post them.

The camera processed the image to a large/fine jpeg, as per my settings (as outlined in post #3). The only thing I did after the fact was the crop. There's not much to understand- I don't do a lot of software processing in the computer.