What technical feedback would you like if any? Any
What artistic feedback would you like if any? Any
I’ve taken this one about as far as I can on my own. What caught my eye initially was the way the rocks seemed to angle directly into the sunlight and how the light was just catching the tops of some of those rocks. I need to do a little clean up and I am probably going to crop it down to a 4x5 to elimante most of the clutter on the right side that doesn’t play a role. But I wanted to hear thoughts and suggestions before going further.
Pertinent technical details or techniques:
(If this is a composite, etc. please be honest with your techniques to help others learn)
This is a focus stack, one for the foreground rock and then the rest is focused further into the frame.
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David, thanks for sharing. I really like the composition. It really pulls you in and shows depth. Hocking Hills is a gorgeous area.
For me, I think the dodging on the foreground rocks could be dialed back a bit. The green moss looks a bit too saturated and the amount dodging is a little out of place to my eye for how dark the surrounding scene is. I like the idea of accentuating the rocks to act as a leading line, but I think it would remain an effective path if it were subtler.
I do agree about the 4x5 ratio to balance it out more.
I will second Adam’s comments. Here’s what it looks like cropped to 4x5. I don’t think you want to take any off the left side because then the rock would be too close or clipped.
I agree with @Adam_Bolyard’s comments about the crop and the top of the rocks. I think the green rocks could have been emphasized a different way. Rather than dodging those rocks, sometimes you can draw attention to something by burning down the area immediately around it (a vignette of a key element). I might suggest dialing back the dodging of the rocks, and instead using some darks (like D2 in TK) luminosity masks to burn the surrounding darker tones in the water, mud, etc.
I am a big fan of incorporating fallen leaves into autumn images, I think it adds to the nature story that you have here. I know the leaves in the LRC are in shadow, but they feel a bit cool to me. I might try warming the lighter tones in the leaves in the LRC.
Is that a small “glacial erratic arch” in the rocks in the URC ? If so that is pretty cool to see.
@Adam_Bolyard Thank you for that, I’m always most concerned with the composition, being so new that is the one thing I look for the most CC on because I figure I can fix the rest later…sadly you can’t change the composition! Thanks for the comments regarding the dodging. Looking back at it I agree completely. I often feel like my edits aren’t quite enough so it is good to hear when I push it too far. I tried to dial it back in a number of areas in my updated post at the top. I would love to hear your thoughts on the reedit.
@Michael_Lowe I plan to crop it down to 4x5 for sure, I always try to do it right at the end because the edits don’t get applied to it if I crop it first in PS (if I am wrong there let me know).
@Ed_McGuirk I took your advice and toned down the dodging quite a bit then burned the areas around it. You made a great point, something important for me to remember…it is the relationship between light and dark that is important, not the overall brightness of a given area. I warmed up the right side of the image and particularly focused on that corner. I believe it is! I wish there were a better way to highlight it, I tried to add some warmth into the “hole” to try to draw the eye there a bit, not sure if it worked in the re-edit, would love your thoughts overall!
Hi David. I like what you did with the rework in terms of the revised dodging and burning, it has a more subtle and natural feel to it now. I think the subtle warming of the LRC helps as well.
Just for the heck of it I decided to experiment with it to see if it could take any more warming in the LRC, knowing that it couldn’t go too much further without making the shadows look un-naturally warm. So I used a TK Lights 2 luminosity mask to make a selection, and then applied a Photoshop Photo Filter Warming adjustment layer thru the selection. My original intent was then to mask that off to only the LRC, but I liked what it did to the entire image and let it go thru to all the lights. In doing this rework I also noticed a couple stray branches in the URC that I cloned away.
@Ed_McGuirk great suggestion with the L2 mask with a warming filter. I never even thought to do that…I finished it up with a 4x5 crop because of much of the clutter on the right side. I appreciate your suggestions, it is much better than it was before! I added it to the top of this post.
