Critique Style Requested: Standard
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
Taken from a boat near the Chesapeake Bay, with the waxing gibbous moon (2 nights before full) rising among some clouds at sunset. At first I was trying to capture the rising moon together with water and ground, but then decided to zoom in. I see this image almost as an abstract, with the moon very recognizable of course, but seen in kind of an unfamiliar setting, with the clouds not so recognizable. I like the complementary colors of orange clouds and blue sky.
Technical Details
Canon 5D mk iv, 560 mm (100-400 with 1.4x extender), handheld 1/1000 sec, f8, ISO 2000. Processed in Lightroom and Topaz DeNoise. Only a small amount of cropping.
Very nice! You had clean stable air to get such good sharpness on the moon that low on the horizon. The clouds do have a very abstract look.
The sky color feels a bit cyan. I did a Color Balance and pushed the midtones a bit away from Cyan toward Red and the sky felt better and the moon and clouds went even warmer, which would fit with last light and a rising moon.
Thanks for your comments Diane. Being somewhat new at adjusting colors in LR, could you explain to me a bit more on what you mean by doing a Color Balance? Did you mean the WB dropper? that took me too far into deep blues. I tried pushing Tint a bit to the right, which had a similar effect to what you describe, but I’m not sure if that’s what you meant?
My option for tweaking the JPEG was to pull it into PS, where I used a Color Balance adjustment layer. But color adjustments are always best done in the raw stage and LR is a great tool. The starting point is the Temp and Tint sliders – that is probably all you need here. The presets and whatever the in-camera WB was may or may not be accurate but are worth a look. The WB dropper is meant to be used on an area that should be neutral, which does not occur in most images.
There isn’t a lot to “balance to” here but the sky color is a very good target. A calibrated and profiled monitor help but these days they’re a lot better than they used to be.
Global adjustments are the place to start, then if you really need to work with individual colors, go to the HSL panel.
