Hi folks. Here’s a photo that I made at Ruby Beach on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Looking for another set of eyes to look at this one, especially processing. I’m also curious as to how this looks on your monitor. Is it too dark? Does it capture the mood of the post sunset atmosphere?
Also, I have been trying to perfect the calibration on a new monitor so comments about tonality, brightness, darkness etc are welcome as well.
Truth about this is that I took this in 2011, seven years ago. I have such a huge backlog of photos that I want to process, this being one of them. I’m not sure that my compositional standards have changed a lot since then. When I started I never really paid attention to compositional rules and shot, and still shoot, according to how harmonious the image components seemed arranged to me.
I get caught up in my own little world sometimes and forget to put my work in front of someone else prior to releasing it to the real world. This is something that I want to change. I’m glad to have this forum.
Pertinent technical details or techniques to help others learn:
Nikon D90 - 10mm - 1/30 sec - f/13 - Iso 100
If this is a composite please be honest with your techniques and share some details so others can learn:
This is a single exposure taken at the edge of darkness post sunset.
I really like this photograph. I’m looking at it from my work monitor, and it looks good to me. The colors are clean and bright, and the darks are rich without being pure black. It works for me.
Beautiful coastal sunset image. Sky is killer and I like the reflections as well as the angle of the rock; I mean it’s position so that there is enough light falling on it to allow for just the right amount of detail.
Color/sat look excellent. I’m on my main PC monitor at home, although truth be told it’s been at least 6 months since I’ve calibrated…
Two small things for me. The first is wishing for a skosh more breathing room on the left. Hardly a biggie. But also the complete darkness in the LL. The issue is not so much that I’m looking for detail in the sand (realizing it’s dark outside…) but combined with the small gap between the rock and edge, my eye wants to follow around the left and both the gap and the darkness kinda of stall the eye. Ok, getting picky, but just a thought to consider.
Hey Gary, awesome image! I love the colors and the textures on the ground. It’s very interesting to me that you don’t think your compositional standards have changed recently! Maybe they were just always good.
Your question is pretty great timing for me - I literally finished setting up a new monitor and color calibrator a couple of minutes ago. I still have my old monitor hooked up (which was calibrated as well) so I can compare on both.
For my taste, I think the lower lefthand corner is just a little bit too dark. My histogram in photoshop is not showing it as 100% black, but I am finding it really hard to see any detail in the darkest parts. I can see a bit if I zoom into 300% and look really close. That may be fine for you, but just thought I would offer my opinion.
I am seeing just a little bit of halo around the rock as well. Mark Metternich recently posted a really great video on halo removing that was a game changer for me. Basically, you just create a layer in “Darker Color” blending mode and clone stamp from a nearby area onto the halo and it only targets the areas that are lighter than the clone source. The halos I’m seeing are wider than just a few pixels, so I might also try a very narrow luminosity mask and some light burning. Hope that helps.
I would really enjoy if you posted more of your stuff here!
The colors look terrific, I do think you have lost about any detail in the lower left…
If you can bring it up without noise and weirdness, I might try.
The halo is more than acceptable to me…
Hi Brent. Thank you. I appreciate your great comment.
I have a method similar using luminosity selections and either a clone brush or a burn brush. Hand work.
I looked at my high res version and it doesn’t seem as noticeable so I suspect that it was exaggerated when I sharpened it for web. I also suspect that, because this is a lower pixel count than my D810, I took this with my old D90, this effect is exaggerated.
I’m with you on the dark area. It makes that corner heavy. I typically purposely leave details in my shadows. I certainly don’t have 100% black in any of my photos except for some of my black and white work. Funny because I remember succinctly that my first goal in my processing was to cover the tone curve without reaching absolutes. I remember thinking to myself that when I look at dark shadows in real life, I can usually see inside of them.
And I always seem to struggle with being happy with my monitor calibration. At this time I have two screens but one of them is twice the resolution. It’s impossible to get them synched. I plan on buying another monitor similar to my new one for consistency Hopefully that will keep me from getting more frustrated when I compare my files on them. I also hate to have to finish a file, look at it on my other monitor, my phone, then my Surface pad and have them all display different. lol
I appreciate your kind words Brent. I respect you, your opinion and your excellent work. Thank you.
Ugh, well that is a preview of what is to come for me! The new monitor is 4k and the old one is 1920x1200. I also go insane looking at my images on different screens. The hope with the higher end calibrator would be to alleviate some of those problems, but maybe I just paid a bunch of money to make it worse! What you have is definitely not bad or anything worse than a very minor technical error so I wouldn’t lose sleep over it.
And wow, that blows me away, much obliged. The feeling is mutual. I don’t know if you remember, but we ran into each other in the gorge in 2015 while I was on my very first workshop. We said hi but I had no idea who I was talking to. I wish I had known I was talking to at the time!!
Yeah. I remember that day. I can’t recall if I was conducting a tour myself or not though. The gorge is slowly opening back up after the fires. I’m looking forward to Spring.
I use a Spyder5 Pro. Not sure if it’s the best but that’s the one that I use.
Gary, I really like the way you have processed the rock, the sky and the areas on the sand receiving light. The sea stack in particular looks great. My monitor is calibrated, and while there are some hints of detail in the sand below the rock, it looks much too dark for my taste. I think this “dark” issue gets magnified by the luminosity difference between the sea stack and the sand beneath it. Your processing of the seastack increased it’s luminosity (quite natural looking), but there is too sharp a transition to very deep shadow in the sand. Yet in the real world, they are more or less in similar light. I think you need to bring the sand into better luminosity balance with the seastack, perhaps with a gradient approach. I would also vote for having more room on the left if possible.
Beautiful scene, Gary. The colors look really good on my calibrated monitor. I am not usually big on shadow detail, but bottom left looks a little heavy. Certainly not an image breaker, but if you could bring out a hint of detail on there, especially in the rock, I think it would be worth it.
I’m going to go back and allow more light into the shadow. That aligns with my initial thoughts after I finished it, sat on it and looked again. My only thought is that I was trying to hide some funky rocks and patterns over there with the heavier shadow. We’ll see. I can see your point, Ed, in how if there were that much light on the seastack there would be more on the foreground. I love logic.
And I think that I did crop it a little so I may be able to shift it over.
Thank you.
lol
What you have is definitely not bad or anything worse than a very minor technical error so I wouldn’t lose sleep over it.