This image was taken from a very popular viewpoint in the Austrian alps. In the foreground you can see the world’s first true mountain railway (constructed 1848 - 1854), which is still in active use today. Behind it rises Schneeberg (“snow mountain”), the easternmost mountain in the Alps to exceed 2000m. I have photographed this spot a few times, but the fresh snow made it too hard for me to pass up the opportunity. I even got lucky with an epic display of alpenglow.
Pertinent technical details or techniques:
Settings: Sony a7iii, Tamron 28-75mm @ 59mm, f11, iso 400, 1/30s, polarizer
I brightened up the foreground by a little over 1 stop, while keeping the exposure for the mountain and sky as is. Other than that I only did some minor tweaks to contrast, saturation and color. At the end I blended both copies of the exposure using layer masks in Photoshop.
Specific Feedback Requested:
Every critique is welcome as long as it is constructive. Overall I am looking more for feedback on post processing, than composition. This viewpoint doesn’t offer much variety, unfortunately. I was trying hard to make the image look “natural” even though I stretched the dynamic range quite a lot in post.
Does the image feel natural to you?
Do you like the colors and contrast?
Would you have processed the image differently somehow?
Many thanks in advance!
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Hi Martin! This is beautiful scene and well captured. I really like your composition and how you placed the old railway. Lightening the foreground works very well for me too.
I like the composition, it makes me wander trough all the small details on the image, from the railway to the gorgeous ligth on those peaks.
The alpenglow is gorgeous but it creats a bit of unbalance with cold foreground, it makes the top of the image stand out and for me the beaty and interest is on that railway waving trough the mountain and the snow, of course, IMO.
I would also remove those “greener” branchs on the lower center of the image and on the lower right corner, they seam to be a bit distracting.
As i was writing this post i decided to download the image and make some tweaks of my own, hope you don’t mind.
As said above i removed those trees, also lowered the gain of the yellow chanel with a Camera Raw filter. After that i added some spliting with dark blue on the shadows and a small amount of ligth blue on the highligths, just to try and balance the colour of that peak with the rest and try to maintain the temperature constrast. And finaly raise the overall saturation of the yellow channel to boost the alpenglow again but also raise the remaing yellows on the image (on the bridges and on those rocks).
It’s easy to see why you stopped to photograph this again. The flocking the snow brings is very nice, and I think your decision to open up the foreground was a good one; it looks excellent. You might play with a curve that drops the midtones of the alpenglow and sky. It is pretty bright here, and that would bring out the color a bit more as well.
Thank you very much for the detailed comment @João_Ferrão. I tried to incorporate what you and @John_Williams suggested by adding cooler tones to the highlights and toning down the brightness of the alpenglow just a bit.
The only thing I haven’t managed to do is to edit out the trees in the bottom right corner. Maybe it’s because I am a pixel peeper Anyone got tips for me in this regard?
First, let me say that I think the rework is a nice improvement, the luminosity in the scene feels much better balanced, and does more justice to the wonderful light in the sky, and the alpenglow.
Very nice work on this image Martin.
Regarding the trees in the lower right corner (LRC). You can’t crop them away without losing other important things. If you are okay with it, you would need to clone them away. If you use Adobe software, Photoshop does a better job with this type of stuff than Lightroom. Try using Content Aware Fill, the Healing tool, or the Clone tool itself. Here is a rework where i took a stab at it, I also cloned away some trees along the bottom center.
Anyone got tips for me in this regard?
