Sunshine Makes Me Happy

Except for this scene which is driving me nuts…I have tried every luminosity masking technique I know and yet I can’t see to get the right tonal balance. Hep me, Hep me, won’t somebody please help this poor photographer :slight_smile:

This a very early, sun breaking the horizon shot

Specific Feedback Requested

EVERYTHING, Please!

Technical Details

Is this a composite: No
D810, 200-500 @200mm, f/5.6, 1/640 (slight breeze), ISO 400

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Looks like it was overexposed so I’m not sure how much it can be saved. Can you put up an unadjusted jpeg for us to play with?

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It 's very pleasing to me – what changes are you trying to make? More definition in the lighter areas?

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Have a go at it.

I’m going to second the title you gave the image. :slight_smile: I like it, photography “padawan” though I may be. Have you considered cropping out the middle right side and posting it as a mono-chome to the weekly challenge? That’s actually what I thought it was when I first saw the post out of the corner of my eye when looking through the latest.

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I agree with Diane - I find this to be a very pleasing image as it is. Yes, maybe there could be more detail on the left side, but as Ariella suggested, you could crop the image to contain only the center and right portions. If you’ve got enough pixels for that, I think that would also result in a nice image.

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I’m still a little uncertain what you want, but I’d try something to bring out more detail in the left half then layer that on the one we see and mask to the balance point. I’d first try things like Nik CEP’s Tonal Contrast or Detail Extractor.

I completely agree with cropping out the water.

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Like maybe this?

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I like the composition and the light here, I think this image has a lot of potential. My personal preference would be to approach this with a gentler hand in terms of contrast, for a softer, more painterly look.

Here is my stab at a rework, starting from the un-adjusted Jpeg. (could likely do even better starting from the raw file). I used two LM’s to further recover highlights, a TK Darks 5 and a TK Darks 4, applied to curves adjustment layer. The curves were left untouched and simply changed the blend mode to multiply. For each of these two layers i played with reducing the opacity until they were nicely balanced. Then I used a TK dehaze layer to add some contrast in the Darks (Dark s2 mask appled to the dehaze layer). And then did a little color dodging on the light rays using a Lights 2 mask, and a yellow color picked from the scene. Here you go,I pref teh more subtle look of this rework. The weakest part of this rework is the highlight recovery, but I’m sure I could do better starting from the raw.

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Thanks, Ed, an interesting approach and I like it…what panel is the TK dehazer adj on? Inquiring minds want to know.

I use the TK Cx panel , and in that in the LLC is a button “TK >”. Click that button and submenu of tools appears, and TK Dehaze is near the top of that submenu. I run the Dehaze, and then apply a Darks 2 masks to the overall De-haze group, which limits the dehaze only to the darker tones, which I prefer over a global dehaze.

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Thanks, Ed. I’m still learning all the TK tools.