Greetings and first post

Hi, so first of all hello everyone I’m new here.

I’m João Ferrão from Portugal.
Oh and forgive any mistake of mine :slightly_smiling_face:
Cheers

What technical feedback would you like if any?

Any, basically. But mainly color balance and exposure choice.

What artistic feedback would you like if any?

Again, any :wink: but composition is a doubt I have.

Pertinent technical details or techniques:

(If this is a composite, etc. please be honest with your techniques to help others learn)

No stacking (haven’t tried yet) just a hand held photo.
No ND filter, gradient or polariser.

If you would like your image to be eligible for a feature on the NPN Instagram (@NaturePhotoNet), add the tag ‘ig’ and leave your Instagram username below.

You may only download this image to demonstrate post-processing techniques.

First of all, welcome to NPN João! I am quite sure that you will enjoy and learn in this wonderful community of photographers. That said, I am not a pro, and I am not as experienced in landscape photography as others on here are, so I will leave the critiquing to them. To me, this is a beautiful scene and an excellent first submission. Looking forward to more of your work in the future.

Hello João, welcome to NPN. This is a very attractive scene. The light on the near hillside looks great and show off some fine colors. The distant lake and mountains add well, making for a fine long view. You could reduce the haze in the distance with a polarizer, if you wanted to. While the layer of high clouds adds some interest to the sky, you could also crop all of those out to create a panorama where the land gets more of the viewer’s attention. Those are the kinds of decisions that you get to choose as you develop your own “artistic vision”.

Hello João, Welcome to NPN! A grand view for sure and an excellent landscape capture. the composition works for me primarily becuase the main elements are balanced in roughly a thirds arrangement. You have the foreground forested slope, the midground valley, lake and mountains and then of course the sky/clouds. I might wish for less sky, but I think it’s apparent you needed to include those upper clouds. Cropping from the top I think, degrades the sky a little

Agree with Mark about the haze. Now, not much can be done about atmospheric haze except for shooting at different times/seasons and perhaps using a polarizer. Short of trying to mitigate in the field, you can try to reduce it in processing.

I also think the valley/mountain element, basically that entire triangle shaped midground is rather blue. Now, it’s entirely possible and likely there was a natural blue component to the light at the time, but given there was direct sunlight on the scene, I would think the color balance would be warmer (in the valley/mountains only. The foreground and sky look good.)

I hope you don’t mind I took a crack at this to demonstrate. I used a blues channel luminosity mask for the valley/mountains and used both a Hue/Sat layer as well as a Levels layer to 1. reduce the blue/cyan saturation and 2. add a little contrast. I masked out the sky and foreground hill.

Very minor, but maybe you’ll notice I cloned out the brighter, exposed soil in the LLC, lower left corner that attracted the eye a little bit.

Lastly, I bumped up the contrast and colors ever so slightly and tried to squeeze out a little more contrast in the valley.

Lastly, lastly… I wanted to acknowledge that your file is quite clean. I mean, I couldn’t find any dust bunnies! :wink:

Here’s the edited version.

Many thanks to all for the warm welcome.
Shirley_Freeman (sorry I can’t tag all) looking forward to post some more work and have some time (not for the next days unfortunately) to explore the site and everybody’s work :slight_smile:
@Mark_Seaver I surely regret not using the polariser now. Next time I go there I’ll give it some more shoots, hopefully with more time and calm.
@Lon_Overacker I don’t mind at all, I am here to learn and post processing is a skill I have to develop (no pun intended), your edit is awesome I’ll have to try and replicate it :wink: as far as the crop of the sky (also as Mark said) I ll to try it, the cloud (IMO) adds content but maybe it’s a bit to much.

Lastly thank you all again. :slight_smile: Cheers

No problem João.

I’m not sure where you are in your development, but if you haven’t already, please check outTony Kuyper’s Luminosity Masks. Tony’s panels along with the paired Sean Bagshaw’s videos and tutorials are highly recommended. Could be a lot for starting out, but definitely bookmark. And you can get 20% discount when/if you decide to join NPN.

Anyway, here’s a quick screen shot of the layer’s palette I have for your image. Again, not sure where you’re at, but the two layers Levels and Hue/Saturation show a mask where basically the adjustments were applied just to the main triangle area of the mountains.

Untitled-1

@Lon_Overacker thanks for the layer shoot :slight_smile: I have some (rusted) know how on post processing. I studied photography some years ago but life lead me to other areas :slight_smile: now I am taking the dust of the photography bug and starting to shoot regularly again, but some concepts vanished, so only time and restudying them.will bring them back.

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