This king tide shot was taken at Cape Disappointment Washington in February, 2023.
_MG_8318.dng (43.6 MB)
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Hello Galen!
First of all, Welcome to NPN! A grand first post and glad you chose to post in the Challenge Gallery. Being a new member, I don’t want to assume too much, but will assume you’re posting specifically in the Processing Challenge Gallery to see what others can come up with? Of course that’s what this gallery is for. For regular critique and feedback, we have the standard Landscape (and other) galleries as well. Hope to see you post in there as well.
I’ve not been to this spot on the Oregon coast - but those enormous crashing waves are very well known! You’ve captured an awesome wave. Such power is captured with these waves. The scale of not only the lighthouse, but maybe more important, the seagulls, really shows the enormity of the wave.
I do like the color, contrast and drama you were able to pull out of the sky. I’m wondering if it takes away some attention from the wave? That falls right in the personal choice bucket and of course is very subjective.
The obvious detraction are the logs at the bottom. From your original you cropped to eliminate a good portion of them, but not all. To me anyway, this really prevents this image from being elevated to awesome, or even a print let’s say. I’m going to assume it was probably in the dangerous category to get in front of, or on top of the logs to remove from the composition and you were quite literally constrained with the framing, not to mention these are timing shots and we can always have the perfect viewpoint.
With that, I chose to crop square to remove as much off the bottom as possible while still have enough surf at the bottom to anchor. Then, the circular branch was going to be problematic. Beyond my cloning skills as this is a large chunk that wasn’t going to be cloned out easily. The next option in the tool kit is the Transform tool. I first cropped square coming in a bit on the right, but not too close to crowd the wave. Then copied the bg layer, enabled the Transform tool and used the Skew to pull the wood out of the frame. Fortunately the skew did not alter reality very much - at least to the untrained eye.
Once happy with the crop I added various layer’s dodging, burning and otherwise playing with contrast, colors, etc. I wanted to increase the contrast in the clouds, but didn’t want to overwhelm the wave, trying to balance it all out.
It’s such a powerful and dynamic scene I felt the clutter at the bottom was detracting. Here’s my edit and including a screenshot of the layer stack.
Thanks for sharing! This was a great processing challenge.
Welcome aboard and we look forward to more images and your participation in the galleries and forums!
@Lon_Overacker, thank you very much! This is the kind of improvement I was looking for. I appreciate all the work you put into this… I wanted to tame down the sky from my first attempt and balance it better with the wave. Thank you.
Another thing… clearly I need to learn how to use the transform and skew tool. I tried to use the Heal tool to clean that up but without much success. Thanks again!
Galen,
You’re welcome. We all learn new things - I’m always learning and adding processing tips and shortcuts to my tool box.
Transforming with skewing is pretty straight forward - although I struggle with drawing the line between what is reasonable edit, and what is fabrication or going too far with altering reality. I think this edit is pretty minor.
Started with a crop. A good size chunk of the log remained because didn’t want to crowd the wave. After the crop, I dupe the bg layer and open the Edit>Transform tool> skew. Then simply grab the lower right corner and pull til the log disappears. The distortion in the water by stretching is really minimal and not eve noticable. Once the cropping/framing/cloning, etc. is done, then I work on the colors/contrast and other processing work.
Of course I’m sure there are those who may work on the image to completion, then crop/transform at the end. The advantage there is that you can always revert your crop/transform and not have to reprocess anything else. Cropping before processing means you’d have to repeat all that processing if you change your mind onthe crop, because all those pixels have been disgarded already.
Anyway, some screenshots of the process.
@Lon_Overacker this is incredibly helpful. It gives me a lot of things to try and experiment with.
This may be the most basic of questions, but what do you mean when you dupe the background layer? I’ve duped layers many times, but usually it’s the whole image.
Hey Galen, no worries I should have used the proper term. I’m referring to “duplicating the background layer”. Either via the menu Layer - Duplicate Layer or Contol-J on the keyboard (for PC, I’m Mac illiterate.) You can also do by dragging the background layer in the Layer’s Pallette down to the bottom little icon - don’t know the name of it.
Hope this helps!
ps. of course duplicating the bg layer will double your file size, so keep that in mind.
