Cloudy fall day, Berkshires

[DanK]

I haven't been able to use my regular equipment for 6 weeks, as I heal from shoulder surgery, but today I took a walk in Western Massachusetts carrying my old tiny 12 MPX Lumix LX-100, which weighs almost nothing and which I can sort of manage with one hand.

It was a cloudy day, which makes colors intense, but I have always had a hard time deciding how to edit photos taken on very overcast days.

Here's a quick edit of one. It's dark, as you can see from the histogram, but brightening it seemed unnatural. In any event, I welcome all suggestions about ways to edit photos of this sort, as well as specific suggestions for this one.

I'm uploading a fairly large copy so that anyone who wants to can play with it.

Thanks

Dan

[Manfred M]

Heavily overcast days are actually great for photography, if you can manage to keep the sky out of the shots. The light is beautiful and diffuse; details come out nicely. The sky becomes a giant soft box and give a beautiful, non-directional light. At times I try to copy this type of light in the studio and use a 7 foot umbrella to create on-axis lighting.

Tight crops and fairly closeup subjects tend to work better than vista type landscape. The dark clouds popping through the tops of the trees is almost distracting here. Had you gotten up close to those grasses, you might have had something interesting to work with.

It sounds like that shoulder surgery has been successful and you are now in that healing stage. I hope things continue to move ahead for you on that front.

[DanK]

Manfred,

Many thanks.

Re the clouds: that's actually a mountain in the background, turned blue by the humidity of the air.

I was constrained in terms of location. Even though that area is just grass, visitors are asked to stay on one mowed path that was quite far from the scene. What I really wanted was a focal length of about 200mm, but my Lumix reached only 70mm full frame equivalent.

This is one circumstance where the discussion we had quite a long time ago about separating luminosity from color matters a great deal. Adding contrast with a normal blend mode (or in LR/ACR) in an image like this makes it garishly oversaturated. I used a luminosity blend mode for some adjustments in this first edit and will probably switch some of the others to luminosity when I re-edit it.

Re the shoulder: thanks very much. The surgery was completely successful, and I'm expected to regain 100% of function. However, even when things go well, the recovery from this sort of surgery is very slow. I'll find out more in about 10 days, but from what they said early on, I think I'll be able to handle my regular photography equipment by mid-December, and I should be fully recovered by the middle of March.

Dan

[billtils]

Dan, best wishes for a speedy and complete recovery.

Bill

[DanK]

Bill,

Thanks.

Here's another try, also quick and dirty. I used Adobe's enhance details, which is a big help with an image like this. I cropped more to get rid of more of the distracting background and did some quite different local edits. Still dark and not quite what it should be, but a bit closer, I think.

Dan

[Geoff F]

That version looks better to me.

Maybe slightly increase the highlights, while keeping the shadows dark?

[DanK]

Thanks. A good suggestion. I’ll try that.


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