I was lucky enough to join a convey of vehicles to explore some of the back country of the interior of BC. This shot is from one of the lake’s which we camped at. The light as it set behind nearby peaks caught my attention as it spot lighted a portion of the lake.
I kept much of the darker shadows pretty dark as I though it added a bit of mystery to parts of the image. Do you agree? Also do you think this image is too cool? This image has an analogous colour scheme from yellow to blue with no warm tones.
Pertinent technical details or techniques:
18mm, 5s, f14, ISO 50
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Nathan, I like the processing here, the dark shadows do add mystery and create a mood. I would not lift any shadows in the near foreground, but I might lift them slightly in the reflections of the trees on the right side. I also like the effect of the overall cool processng of the scene, the only thing I might consider to warm up would be the sunlit portion of the trees on the right. I might also like to see the exposure of the highlights in the sky dropped slightly.
In terms of composition, I like the overall concept a lot, and love the crossed logs in the center of the image. The branches in the extreme LLC are a bit distracting to me, and may be candidates for burning and/or cropping to make them less intrusive.If you don’t mind i took a stab at this, with a crop from the left and some vignetting added to the LLC…
It’s not my image, @Nathan_Klein is the maker. Please direct comments about things such as this to the original maker, not to someone who is just commenting on the image.
Oh, what a lovely, calm scene. Great composition, and nice use of those logs in the foreground; I like how the angled one mimics the trees’ reflection. I like Ed’s suggestions, and it does look distorted and/or tilted a bit. I did a few edits, taking Ed’s suggestions a bit farther, and can post them if you want to see them. Essentially, I think the main draw for our eye is the tree/sky line, especially on the left.
@Nathan_Klein, here you go. The blues might be a bit too much, especially in the water. If I wasn’t clear in my first comment (and I think I wasn’t), it was the tree sky intersection that was catching my eye, not the light on the trees in frame right. Basically, I rebalanced the light to draw more attention to the trees on the right. It really is a beautiful scene, well composed.
I think you did very well to recognize and include the criss-crossing old logs in the foreground. I’m bummed though that it had to include the stump and branches. I think Ed is going in the right direction by attempting to mitigate their presence. I might even take it further and darken further the top surface of the stump, darken the branches and also clone out the light patch on the submerged log at the bottom - all that to lessen the presence in that corner.
The colors are improved somewhere between Ed and Bonnie’s renditions. I like the enhanced color and definition in the sky and also the warming of the light on the forest to the right.
The strength here are the angles and diagonals with and between the crossing logs in the water, the symmetry of the reflection and those angles and diagonals up top.
Ok, so I went ahead and tried my hand at this one. I think this scene and image are worth the tweaks. Started off with a very crude attempt at cloning away some of the extending branches. Then also crudely darkened the branches and top of stump; while also cloning the bright patch on the log and some burning of some additional things in that area.
Then I used the LAB Color method for boosting the colors a bit and then painted/masked out the areas in a low opacity layer; mainly wanted to give the sky a boost as well as the treeline. A Selective color layer just masking the trees on the right to warm them up a tad. I used TK’s MT2 selection to actually bring up the luminosity of the lake itself - there’s some cool stuff going on underneath the surface. I masked out so as to just affect the lake. Finally a Hue/Sat layer to tweak the blues and cyan. Interesting, the water had blue, but the sky adjusted with the cyan.
Might not be the direction you wanted to go - but I agree with your initial thought about the darker areas (trees on the left) to give parts of the image a little mystery. No detail required in those small areas anyway.
Thanks @Lon_Overacker I like the direction you’ve taken this. And thanks so much for the detailed description of you’re processing - super valuable!
I think I’ll try to straighten the reflections of the trees and remove the stump which I agree is an unworthy anchor. Some may not agree with these type of modifications but I think it’s a good learning exercise
It’s taken me a while to finish this one as I’ve been busy.
Thanks all for the feedback any comments on the final are welcome.
In this revision I warped the tree reflections on the left slightly to remove the lens distortion. I also reduced the brightest highlights in the sky warmed the highlights and darkened the blue hues using a hue/saturation adjustment layer in photoshop.
Finally, I used the several content aware fill layers to remove the stump in the bottom left. I wouldn’t normally modify nature like this but as the step was human made in that it was cut down and didn’t fall naturally I figured that removing it was fair game.
