A series of cascades meet on a February morning. Taken in Michigan’s western Upper Peninsula.
Type of Critique Requested
Aesthetic: Feedback on the overall visual appeal of the image, including its color, lighting, cropping, and composition.
Technical: Feedback on the technical aspects of the image, such as exposure, color, focus and reproduction of colors and details, post-processing, and print quality.
Specific Feedback and Self-Critique
I really wanted to remove distractions that come with a larger scene and focus on a set of particular cascades. Any and all feedback is appreciated!
Hi Josh,
that looks great. What a beautiful detailed waterfall shot.
There are two small things I would adjust:
1 . It seems to me that the image has a slight cyan cast.
2. I would darken the bright area at the ULC a little.
Just open the Curve Panel and click on the red channel. Then you can slightly drag the curve in the red direction. By the way, this works with the other channels (green/magenta or blue/yellow) in the same way.
Again, that’s a great shot with a perfect shutter speed. I could spend hours shooting scenes like that.
I was going to point out the same thing - nice reply here.
I also felt like the brightest part of the waterfall is just a bit much - do you have any other darker exposures you could use to fill that in so that your eye doesn’t go there right off the bat?
I used a radial filter in Lightroom to help get rid of the harsh section in the upper left hand corner. Anything I could have done better with that adjustment or in general to add to this image?
Beautiful image. I’m quite certain I could have spent a LONG time at this location and shot until I ran out of batteries…!
@Jens_Ober provided some very helpful tips and I agree with the color cast. It’s not way off and actually within one’s realm of personal preferences, but worth exploring. The obivous to get rid of all color casts… would be to go all the way to b&w - which could work here too.
In addition to the brighter areas - which you did a great job on taming in your repost, I think some texture in the water was lost as well in those little “hot” areas. Those spots naturally at the tops of the cascades.
I also pulled in to ACR and tried what Jens was suggesting (Thank you Jens! Always learning new things!) So I tweaked the color balance a little, then brought back in to PS. I did crop a little from the right just to remove the dark vertical in the URC, which also mostly removed what looks like a grossly out of focus twig or something that was likely between the lens and the scene. (not a biggie either.)
There is one tool in the Tony Kuyper bag of tools that I am so thankful it remains in the action panels he’s created - and that is the Triple Play (both the Lights and the Darks). This scene was a prime candidate for the Lights Triple Play - which essentially provides a means of targeting the very light areas of an image to 1. reduce the overall brightness and 2. essentiall add detail back in to the highlighted areas. It can be very effective in scenes like this. Lastly I ran this through Topaz DeNoise AI, which also helped with some extra texture in the brighter water.
I think I would spend more time on getting the colors the way you want. But this gorgeous little scene is most certainly worth squeezing ever last bit of beauty out of it.
Very cool image.
You did well in the repost concerning the color but i believe Lon took your picture a little more forward, not only in the cropping (that original URC black caught my immediate attention) and in the processing.
