A picture of a church in Slovenia in between different layers of hills and the Alps in the background. This church is often photographed peaking out of the morning fog in front of a nice mountain panorama. That day however I deliberately shot it from a slightly different viewpoint and without fog in the foreground and just a bit of atmosphere and mist in between the mountains. The sun was rising in between the mountains to the right which put a natural spotlight on the church.
I am wondering, if I could add more three dimensionality to this picture and make the colors pop more. Furthermore I had difficulties highlighting the spotlight on the church, without flattening the image too much. Another issue is the band of trees in the foreground, which I could not avoid including in my frame from this viewpoint. I am wondering, if they disturb the image by putting it off balance.
The image was shot on a Sony A7IIR at 1/320 sec, f8, ISO 100 at 75mm with the Tamron 28-75 f2.8 lens.
You may only download this file to demonstrate how you would process the image. The file is Copyright of the photographer, and you must delete the raw file when you are done. Please post a jpg of what you created, explain what you did, and why you did it.
Hi Ronja,
You had me at layers!! What a beautiful scene . Thanks for offering this as a processing challenge. I don’t do much grand landscape work, so it was fun to give this a try.
My thinking/edits (all done in LR Classic):
I wanted to put more emphasis on the layers and church, so I decided to crop so that the sky became almost another layer and the bottom row of trees wasn’t quite as heavy. I also went against my normal tendency towards cooler temps and decided to warm this up with a morning glow. Linear gradient from top down to soften the farthest layers, and linear gradient from the bottom up to lift the shadows and increase texture and clarity. Small radial gradient around the church just to bring it forward a teeny bit. Increasing clarity overall brought out more details and some of the fog. Tweaked the yellow hue to make it a bit rosy, and warmed up the green a few notches. Very slight (-2) vignette.
The more I look at my version, I wonder if it feels a bit dull. It’s the kind of image that feels like it could tip over into HDR if taken too far, so I erred on the side of a softer, quieter morning, how I imagine it would look if I was standing there.
What a lovely image to spend time with. Thanks, Ronja!
Dear Beth, so sorry for my late reply, just had a baby two weeks ago which is keeping me quite busy at the moment thank you so much for taking the time to edit and share your suggestions on my image! I really appreciate it! I love the warmer tones in your edit and will definitely think about my crop again as well! Thank you for sharing, Ronja
Dear Tom, thank you for editing my image and sharing your version with me! I love how you brought out that sunbeam! I will definitely put more emphasis on that as well in a future re-edit of my shot! Thank you and kind regards, Ronja
. Thanks for offering this as a processing challenge. I don’t do much grand landscape work, so it was fun to give this a try.
thank you so much for taking the time to edit and share your suggestions on my image! I really appreciate it! I love the warmer tones in your edit and will definitely think about my crop again as well! Thank you for sharing, Ronja