Blue Sky Above

Southern Utah again.

D810, 70-200mm

Who needs aspen, these cottonwoods are gorgeous. Nicely framed but two suggestions on PP. Firstly, I find the reflected blue in the water a bit too strong. The blue provides a great color contrast to the warm tones, I would just dial back a bit. Secondly I would burn the sandstone in the upper left and upper right corners to direct the eye more toward the center.

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Many beautiful images from Utah! A great backdrop of sandstone here without any sky. I struggle a bit with the yellow tree, that is not so seperated from the background. At the same time I see that it’s hard to manage exactly that… :wink: But it certainly is a big subject of the image to me, so it would deserve to stand out more. Could some dodge/burn or playing with the colors and some delicate masks help anything here?

Harley,

A beautifully captured image from the canyon lands with a solid vertical composition. I think though, that it’s note quite and strong as most of your work, and of the recent southern Utah images. To be fair, there’s nothing wrong with this capture, or processing. And it took a minute, but then I clued in to the title which tells me the reflected blue in the stream was important; and so the blue, gold, red with some green makes for some great colors.

So there’s two things that I’ll mention. The first Ron already mentioned and that’s the separation between the cottonwood and the canyon wall. Yes, there is color separation, but the tonality, contrast and such is making the separation less apparent. And while I like the presence of the river, it’s just not grabbing me as being that important - and the large rock is mildly distracting.

I like it, a solid image. Just not as striking as most others.

Lon

This looks very different than your other recent posts from southern Utah, while the basic elements are the same, the light is very different. I agree with Lon, it’s the luminosity and contrast of the cliffs that affect the separation of the tree. And that’s a function of the light in the scene. The others looked like they were from overcast days, where the light was softer. You could try to reduce the luminosity of the cliffs, perhaps using a mask on color targeting red and avoiding yellow, but it could be tough to pull off.

I prefer the softer light and feeling in your prior images. The almost mixed light in this scene loses some of the colors and textures in the upper cliffs here.

It’s interesting to look at an image like this and try to figure out what’s missing. I think that yellow on a red background is a wonderful color combination as anyone who has looked at G Tal’s work will attest to. In this case it would help if they were isolated. The yellow leaves start to fade in color as you go down so that’s a bit strange. As far as the rock is concerned, the river would be boring without it. Therefore the rock is a good thing.

I think the composition (design, as C Gibbs calls it) isn’t sound. The issue is that you have near horizontal layers crossing a narrow vertical frame. If you crop off a large portion of the river and widen the image it starts to look better. And the 2nd thing is that it’s busy. All those bright white rocks mixed in the red, and those trees scattered about in random fashion, take away a sense of the purpose of the image. I see it as visual noise.

Harley, this is a fun image to view. That cottonwood is lovely against the red cliffs. The mix of red, yellow, and blue works well although I agree that the blue is a bit strong. The relative darkness of the bottom half looks like you might have used an inverted grad filter, but I’m going to guess that this is the shadow cast by the canyon walls from the left. A bit of dodging along the stream bank might look good.