Out looking for some fall colors and found this little pond, just hit it at the right time.
All feedback is welcome
Is this a composite: No
f/7.1 at 1/30 of a second ISO 400
Canon 7D and Tokina 28-80 lens at 28mm
It’s a nice little scene, but wow, did you crank the highlights down or what? Lots of blue in the water and the sky behind the trees that doesn’t look natural. It’s in all the shadows as well. What color space is this in? For the web you need to use sRGB and this doesn’t look right. I think there might be something wrong with that, too.
Thank You for your honest thoughts, I need to work on my post production,
I need to keep in mind just because you can maybe you shouldn’t sliders can be a dangerous thing.
This is a nice little fall scene, Hank. I do like the peaceful mood, but there are a couple of suggestions I have. I would pull the cyan way back and crop some from the top to get rid of those leaves coming down from the ULC and some of the bright sky. I would also dodge the right side just a little. I hope you do not mind, but here is a rework with what I was thinking. Just some suggestions
of course.I really like this view of a pond and even though the colors may be a bit exaggerated it’s not in an unappealing way. The only issue I have is that the reflections don’t reflect what’s there accurately. The brighter sky areas in the reflection are missing in the sky. In fact the reflection is brighter than what’s there and many photographers look for that. I think the sky should be reprocessed.
Post processing aside I think this is a great image. It’s very painterly!
Do I mind, no I am here to learn and get better at this.
I tried to save the sky, and just went down a slider rabbit hole.
I will redo it for sure.
You have got some good, constructive comments here so far. The image does have a painterly look, but it is being held back by processing issues, as noted by the others. The bottom half of the scene looks natural and appealing, it’s the top half where you run into an unrealistic look. In the real world reflections are always darker than the subject they reflect, and that is not the case here. As a result it looks un-natural to our eyes.
You mention sliders, did you use Lightroom to process this image? You could use 2 graduated filters (one for the top and another for the bottom) to try to better balance the luminosty of the top and bottom halves. In terms of the top half, you could make a local adjustment to the top half using the radial filter or graduated filter, but in conjunction with LR’s luminance range mask. This would allow you to reduce the sky highlights without overdarkening the leaves like you have here.
If you could post a Jpeg of the uneditted (or lightly editted ) file, we could try doing some reworks to illustrate some of these techniques.
Ok these two are straight out of the camera, just made smaller to upload.
I have the Adobe subscription so I have lightroom and photoshop I can try to do what your going to do.
Given the of nature your original capture, you actually did a pretty good job with your processing. Due to getting an exposure that reveals this much shadow detail, the sky in the original file is significantly clipped, and has lost detail. Working from the Jpeg posted here, Lightroom could not recover enough highlights to restore detail in the sky. It might be possible to do so from the raw file, but maybe not, this is pretty blown out in the sky.
This is a case where “exposing to the right” might have worked, but you can’t go too far or you get too much clipping and end up with non-recoverable details. I might have exposed this a bit darker to start, enough to avoid sky clipping. Then I would have used Lightroom sliders to push black and shadows to the right, and recover shadow detail. I would have used 2 graduated filters, one in the bottom to primarily do the shadow recovery, and another in the top to recover highlights. In the top grad filter, I would also have turned on luminance range mask to recover only highlights, without darkening the leaves at the top.
This was as far as I could take a rework of the original, which frankly is not much different/better than your original post. I have handled the upper leaves slightly better, but the clipping the sky creates a problem that is hard to overcome This is a case where starting with a darker exposure would have helped the sky look better.
I took this image in 2019, I have learned a little more about photoshop and lightroom since then, now I would take at least two exposures and work them in photoshop then finish in lightroom.
I haven’t decided if I like thinking this way when I shoot a photo now.
This is such a beautiful scene that I would go back and work it. Given the raw file you have now I actually think you’ve done a good job.
I do understand your hesitation in doing too much analysis during a photo shoot. It does affect your seeing and creativity.
Processing software and techniques are nothing more than tools that allow us to accomplish a specific purpose. What is more important is your vision for the image, what story do you want to tell, what look do you want to achieve, what problems do you want to solve? When you are actually out shooting, you should spend most of your time thinking about creative vision, composition, light, etc.
But you also need to spend at least some time thinking about what are the problems and challenges to your achieving your vision that can only be fixed in the field. In this case its the too wide dynamic range that requires either ETTR that avoids highlight clippping, or using bracket and blend type techniques. All you need to do in the field is recognize that the issue exists, and address it. In some ways this is no different than recognizing you need to slap a polarizing filter on to reduce glare on wet vegetation, or darken a sky. You should still focus most of your energy on seeing and creativity. But after you have decided what you to photograph and why, then step back and assess if there are any technical issues that can be addressed in the field that aren’t solvable back on the computer.
