I took this shot in Iceland. It’s just a random church along the southern Ring Road but I liked how it sits at the bottom of these mountains.
I have been playing around with this image basically playing around with contrast, dodging and burning. Also, this was taken in Iceland in March so the super bright greens aren’t out yet so I tried to subtlely enhance the saturation of the hills to make them have a bit more color.
I don’t know what I think about this image and the post-processing I’ve done. I’d be interested to hear what you all like and don’t like about what I’ve done with it.
What technical feedback would you like if any?
What artistic feedback would you like if any?
Post Processing
Any pertinent technical details:
Nikon D850, Tamron 100-400, 210mm, 1/320 sec, f/11, ISO 500
You may only download this image to demonstrate post-processing techniques.
Would this have had more impact with those summer greens? Sure… but I think you did an excellent job with the processing and squeezing enough color out of this - I would say just perfectly. I wouldn’t have thought any saturation adjustments were made at all - this looks quite all natural.
The only wish for this would be a better sky - but then you get what you get and conditions are what they are. And I don’t think cropping out the sky will be any better; the scale and perspective work because the peaks are included.
You did very well given the rather drab conditions/lighting/color.
Real cool composition Luke! I like those mountains dwarf that church.
To bring out more color in the photo you could try boosting the blue primary saturation or green primary saturation sliders in the camera calibration tool in Lightroom (try pushing one of them all the way to 100 and see how it looks). I find that the saturation sliders in the camera calibration tool do a better job of increasing saturation than the vibrance or regular saturation sliders in Lightroom.
Luke, the bright sky is doing you no favors here, it pulls your eye away from the church. Because the dramatic light is falling on the church, I would have re-composed or cropped this scene to place more emphasis on the church by making it larger. Here is a proposed re-crop. I also boosted the TK vibrance a little, but @Luiz_A_Arroyo suggestion would also accomplish a similar thing.
Lovely and stark. The sky is rather bright, but I think by cropping it out you lose the feeling of the overpowering mountains above the small church - the point of the photo, to me. Maybe just lowering highlights/whites in the sky. Even if it looks a bit gray, I think that wouldn’t matter here.
Luke, we get what we get, a gray sky and a bland color tone on the mountainside. I am in Bonnie’s camp…the image is very strong and if the hillside was not green or the sky not supportive, so be it. No amount of manipulation is going to make it an award winner. The image works for me due to the scale of the items captured…church and the horses are a overpowered but thriving in their physical setting.
