Critique Style Requested: Standard
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
A great day in the Tetons - we saw this moose swim across the lakewhile waiting for sunrise at String Lake. It was still very dark. I thought black-and-white worked well for this as there wasn’t much color at the time. The foggy mist was beautiful.
Fujifilm X-T10, f/5.6, ISO 2000, 1/800s, 400mm
Very nice Debbie. That must have been pretty awesome to see. I think the black and white works. The deadfall behind the moose distracts from it a bit but not so much that its a deal breaker in the photo.
Thanks Cameron!
Wonderful catch! It is very dark, though – I think it could be more effective with an exposure bump. It doesn’t have an embedded profile – that’s more important for color images but is a good habit for all JPEG exports. I think it could do with a little off the bottom, too. It’s just slightly top-heavy, to me.
Hi Debbie, I’m your Front Range neighbor, in Eldorado Springs just south of Boulder. And I went to grad school at CSU!
New here, and not experienced at critiquing, so take it with a grain of salt. I love the quiet feeling of the scene and the fog. I can hear the moose splashing. But I agree with Diane that a bit of an exposure bump would help, most importantly if you can dodge the moose to bring some details.
@Diane_Miller What do you mean by embedded profile - do I need to make a change in Lightroom? And, I did make a large exposure increase. It was very dark and well before sunrise. Here’s a small version of the original image.
@Cathy_Proenza Thank you! I actually feel like darkening the moose so it’s more of a silhouette… but I don’t know.
I’m surprised you could dig out so much information from a file that underexposed. The exposure may have been limited by conditions (handholding?) but it’s always best to expose lighter when you can (without blowing highlights) and then darkening in post. Much less noise that way.
You don’t give the focal length but you might have gotten away with a slower SS – 1/200 sec would probably be hand-holdable with even a long lens and would let in 4 times more light.
Color space stuff:
In LR Preferences > External Editing, if you are using PS or any other editor you want to set the color space it will be using. And in PS (or any other editor), you want to set a reasonable color space. For photography, there are only 3 that should be used – sRGB, Adobe RGB (1998) and ProPhoto RGB. You may see others in a dropdown but they are there for specialized uses.
In PS go to the Edit > Color Settings dialog. If you don’t know about this stuff, choose sRGB. You will have a decent color gamut and will avoid a lot of pitfalls with mismatched color settings.
Then in LR go to the Export dialog and choose the color space for an export. For a JPEG it should always be sRGB. LR will do any conversion needed and will tag/embed the profile without you having to tell it to.
Adobe RGB contains a wider gamut of colors and corresponds closely with what most monitors can display. (But sRGB is still the default for browsers.) It is also the best match for most printing. ProPhoto RGB is the closest match to what came out of many modern cameras and very high-end printers can print some of its gamut. But has significant pitfalls for anyone who doesn’t understand color management. It contains colors no monitor can display and a range we can’t even see. It is possible to push things like saturation out of bounds for any current use. Then when you go to print or export, these out-of-gamut colors will be pushed back into the end-use gamut with you having no control over how it is done. It should be avoided by anyone who doesn’t understand its limitations.
And every new version of PS (at least until recently?? I need to check on that) defaults back to sRGB and anyone using a different color space has to re-set it.
sRGB is needed in order for browsers to display the colors correctly. Some will assume sRGB if it isn’t tagged, but others will do bizarre things like displaying in the monitor’s profile, which really messes up colors.
People who export from PS (and possibly other editors) need to check a box in the export dialog to convert to sRGB and another box to embed that color profile tag. Never use Assign sRGB – that is a different thing. Use Convert to.)
@Diane_Miller Wow - this is a lot of info. I added my focal length (400mm, my longest lens) and remembered that this was not my X-T3 but my old extra camera body, a Fuji X-T10. We had just set up on tripods for the sunrise when I spotted the shadow stepping into the water, and it was so dark that mostly what we saw was his wake and not the moose until he started up the shore. So my camera wasn’t ready and we were not prepared to see something like this, lesson learned.
I have Lightroom colorspace set to ProPhoto RGB, should I change to Adobe RGB? In PS it’s already sRGB (I’m a web designer).
In LR I have an NPN export set up per the NPN ‘how to export images’ post and in PS I have ‘convert to sRGB for exports.’
Welcome the Not Prepared Club. It’s a big one.
It may sound strange, but Lightroom doesn’t have a color space. It works behind the scenes in a very wide gamut that is similar to ProPhoto and uses LAB Color. A color space doesn’t become relevant until you go to a pixel-based editor such as PS. The only place to set a color space in LR (unless I’ve really missed something lately??) is in Preferences > External Editing. If you have that set to ProPhoto but your PS space is sRGB, and you don’t have the 3 checkboxes set in the PS Color Settings dialogs to warn you of a profile mismatch, you will be having some major issues with color. Keep it simple and set LR to open images in PS as sRGB. Very few people would ever see the difference between Pro Photo and sRGB, even in side-by-side images.
In a PS export dialog, you won’t need to convert to sRGB because the images are already there, but no problem leaving it that way. Just make sure it is set to embed the profile.
But do yourself a favor and check the 3 boxes to warn you of profile mismatches. But leave your working space as sRGB.
