The Fallen King - Coastal Redwoods, Northern California

What technical feedback would you like if any?

This is a slight tweak to an edit I did about a year ago when I was working through this set of images from a wonderfully foggy morning among the Redwoods. However, what I discovered while working on them is that I struggled to get the fog to look good when I tried to make the images more moody and dark. Ultimately most of the images ended up having a fairly airy and bright fee that worked for some, but not as much on others. This shot is one that I’d like to revisit with a darker tone to it, but find it difficult to make the background not feel ‘dingy’ as the exposure comes down. So far my experimentation with color toning hasn’t yielded a look that feels right in the image.

What artistic feedback would you like if any?

When I took this photo I saw a crown of a king at his tomb, a monument to what was, but still has significance and importance in its surroundings. To that end, what direction would you consider taking the processing?

Pertinent technical details or techniques:

This is a single image shot, taken at 55mm with a 24-105 F4, f/8, ISO200 at 0.5 sec exposure. Editing was fairly straight-forward in Lightroom and Photoshop. Some Orton and Dodge/Burn work was done to accentuate certain areas of the foliage and to soften the background.

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It’s definitely challenging to work in that fog. In my opinion the difficulty here is that half of the image is light and the other dark. It makes it look tonally unbalanced to me.

Oh, I love how that background stump mimics the foreground one. I agree with Igor that it’s difficult to work with such a luminosity range. I don’t mind the big range of light, myself. Considering your first idea, to make it more moody, I tried a couple things in ACR. First, I brightened the lower part (with a gradient filter set to work only on the darker lights to darks) and darkened the top (also with a a gradient filter). The idea was to have a starting point where the luminosity range wasn’t so huge. Then, I lowered the exposure globally, while bringing up the lights a bit, to keep the muddiness at bay, and desaturated the greens (with the idea that you wanted moody - the greens in your OP are cheery, to me). Then, a curve to darken overall. The quality isn’t that great at this point, because there are processing artifacts.

I do like your moody/dark idea as it feels like it fits the scene, with those two sharp trunks - they seem menacing to me.

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I think @Bonnie_Lampley hit the nail on the head…there was discordance between the power of the scene as described and displayed (sharpness and graveyard feel) and the cheeriness of the overall scene. I personally really like her rework and think it is more congruous with the image as intended and is more consistent with the elements you’ve included.

Only compositional recommendation would have been to move slightly to the right to allow the foreground trunk to fill the empty sky more on the left and prevent a near merging with a background tree.

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Love the composition and that wonderful symmetry. @Bonnie_Lampley rework (especially bringing down greens) nailed it down.

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Went back to the drawing board with the recommendations and excellent example for inspiration above. I still struggle with the toning of the foggy background, yo-yo-ing around trying to introduce a slight color to avoid ‘dingy’ grays, but then it feels too strong and artificial. Super subtle tones are so tricky to work.

I actually found the original image perfectly fine and still do, but I feel @Bonnie_Lampley’s re work probably is more in line with your initial intentions.

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Thank you Michael. Any thoughts on my re-edit this morning that lands somewhere in between Bonnie’s and the original.

The subject is intriguing, and the shards of the dead trees do add to the overall mystery of the foggy scene. My only nit on composition is that I wish that you had positioned yourself more to the right to avoid having the foreground dead tree merging with the tree behind it. You could have placed it in a gap between background trees.

This image has a lot of mood, and a lot of potential to be interpreted in different ways. I do think your original image is too bright and airy to meet your intended objective. And I agree with @Igor_Doncov that it’s the much higher luminosity of the top half that’s too bright relative to the bottom half.

I actually like the bottom half of your original post (with it’s stronger greens). To me it’s the top half that needs work. Bonnie’s rework is too gloomy for my taste. Your rework is better than your original, but i wouldn’t reduce the green saturation like you did.

I’ll offer up another interpretation instead. I took your original post, and used a TK Lights 2 Luminosity Mask to reduce the brightness of the fog (leaving the foreground untouched). Using that same mask, I cooled down the fog. I thought the fog was too warm, and was contributing to the light and airy look. I think cooler fog adds more gloom, while keeping the vibrant green colors of the original. Here is my rework.

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