I have a lot of favorite places in Australia, but the desert country of South Australia is nothing short of spectacular. Wild and remote with tapestries of colour and form where creeks scratch marks through the rock.
Comments and criticisms are always welcome.
Pertinent technical details or techniques: 1/160 f11 ISO500 70-200@78mm Tripod
Is this a composite? (focus stacks or exposure blends are not considered composites)
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WOW! You’ve captured wonderfully delicate colors and textures here. The brush in the FG leads me in and the ones in the midground make nice leading lines off to an infinity somewhere off the left edge. The sky color is wonderful! I never thought a desert would be so pretty!!
It may just be me, but the flat horizon on the left feels a bit crooked – maybe a lens correction is needed more than a rotation? But I’d hate to lose even a pixel of that FG.
I second the WOW. This is fantastic. The soft light really makes the whole scene. I feel a sense of peace. I spent several minutes looking at the larger version. It just sings to me. Well done.
I pulled the image to check the distant horizon and saw it’s in Adobe RGB. Probably not a big problem with the subtle colors but it’s always best to convert to sRGB for web posting. For some browsers it can make a difference in the colors. At any rate, I did Edit > Transform > Distort and pulled up the UL corner to make that horizon level. Then I did Image > Reveal All and filled in the sky by selecting the white area and doing Content-Aware Fill, as I hated losing any of the lovely sky.
The colors here are just simply gorgeous! The blush of gold on the bushes in the FG plays so well against the pinks and blues!
I converted to sRGB before posting – don’t know if anyone will see a difference or not.
If Glennie chooses, she could post my revision in her OP so people can toggle back and forth between the 2 versions.
When I pulled up the UL corner, some of the image disappeared behind the “frame”. Reveal all showed a larger frame that included that area and gave me a triangular white area that didn’t contain any of the image.
Glenys, what a place this must be. I love your composition, with the criss-crossing lines in the foreground, The composition conveys a strong sense of vast-ness and depth. Even with the nice color in the sky, I think you made a good choice as to where you placed the horizon, it helps create the sense of depth in the scene.
I think you chose to create a high key type look to showcase the delicate pastel colors in the scene, you have some wonderful pinks and oranges here. While this is a matter of subjective personal taste, I think the image is too bright, and as a result you have lost some of the potential richness of the colors present in the scene. I think you could reduce luminosity in a subtle way, to take more advantage of the colors you have. Here is a rework with just a simple pulling down of the center of the curve. If it were my own image, I might even take it darker, but I tried to stay relatively closer to the spirit of your original vision.
@Ed_McGuirk’s interpretation would have been where I would have gone with the image, if it were mine (and I wish it was). But when I first saw it I was immediately struck by the extreme delicacy of the tonalities. The darker version compresses some tonalities and loses that special feeling, at least in the FG. Not sure how it would work to just to his curve with a very graduated mask in the upper half. But I like the natural graduation across the image as it is.
This image is certainly not one of those that can be appreciated in the thumbnail. I experimented with some cropping and thinking that you could lose some of the sky to bring more attention to the earth. I feel that the size comparison between the trees and the cliffs in the BG is very important to the composition.
Here is a rework with the darkening of tones masked into the top half with the gradient tool. I also used a darks luminosity mask to darken just the darker tones in the bottom half. This does not darken the yellow trees for example. Another variation…
I still love the delicate tonalities of the OP, which go with the delicate and otherworldly colors. I tried a compromise, where I did a gradient mask to leave the bottom half as it was and for the top half just opened the Camera Raw filter and moved the Clarity slider to about +40. That gave a very subtle midtone contrast boost. It may not be quite enough for the full-sized image but I think it’s worth a look. Maybe a tiny bit of Clarity would be needed in addition on the larger file. It may be too subtle to see here without layering the two images and toggling between.
Diane, I’m still finding my way around the CC upgrade! I’ll try and remember to set the conversion to sRGB. I have found there is no “Save for Web” with CC which was so easy. The old Adobe Camera Raw also had a button for saving to a jpeg. I haven’t found that yet in the new version.
Thank you Ed! I like this a lot! The foreground trees still have the nice , dead-yellow colour. Perhaps the orange coloured hills in the mid ground are a little “hard” for me. But this is another version to explore.
Glennie, they’ve moved Save for Web to the Export menu. I hate it when things move and I can’t find them. Shoot me an email any time, or Google “Where is whatever-it-is in PSCC.”
