This is the upland prairie at Chip Ross Park. You get a really nice view of the Coast Range.
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Technical Details
Is this a composite: No
Nikon D3400, 82mm, 1/80, f/18, ISO 100, converted to black and white and did slight adjustments to contrast, blacks, whites, and texture
You have some nice depth here, with the FG vegetation providing a nice visual entry to the landscape. I like the trees on the right as a mid-ground. I could wish for a bit more detail in the hills and sky.
I think B&W is an interesting approach to this image, which helps create more texture and contrast in the foreground grasses than color might have. I think you could even add a little more contrast in the foreground (S-Curve on the Curves).
My only other suggestion is t clone or crop away the dark plants along the very left edge, they attract too much attention for my preference.
Haha! If I had Photoshop I would have probably added a bird! Don’t worry, though, there’s more coming down the pipeline! About the dark plants, do you mean those 2 dark round flower tops? If so I could probably easily get rid of them…
Thank you, as always, for your feedback and suggestions. I really appreciate it!
Thanks @David_Bostock I’m glad you like it. For this particular view I usually like to get down on the ground to hide houses in the city below. It works well!
Hi @Diane_Miller to convert to black and white I go to the B&W button and then it gives me a few choices (landscape, low contrast, flat, soft, etc) so I just usually pick the one that looks best and then go back to the light/exposure sliders and other ones and tweak it as best as possible. Yeah it was a pretty flat overcast day, but I brought out the texture in the clouds as best as I knew how. Thank you for your interest and feedback!
The “light/exposure sliders and the other ones” – I don’t know what LR Mobile has – do you have sliders for the different colors? If so, you can influence their contribution by changing the saturation values of different colors in the underlying image. Finding more texture/detail in the distant hills/sky (mostly blues) is something I go to PS for (Selective Color) but there must be things in LR you can do. Does anyone have any advice?
Hi @Diane_Miller, yeah for some of the black and white photos I do some color adjustments, I usually use the red or green but I haven’t tried blue, so blue would bring out details in the hills and sky, even though the sky is only clouds ? I’ll have to try it! I don’t think I did any color adjustments in this one but I’ll go back in when I get a chance and see what I can do! Thanks!
I don’t know how similar your LR Mobile is to the Classic version that I use, but I never even look at presets. I go right to the color sliders and start moving them to maximize tonal separation by color. Any color that is remotely present in the raw file should be adjusted. You can also alter the white balance sliders and the camera presets (Adobe Color, etc.) Going too far with any color alterations can create artifacts in areas where colors merge. As always, the histogram provides good information.
I much prefer to do B/W after going to PS, as an adjustment layer, as that lets me alter hues and saturation in the underlying raw file with another Hue-Sat layer (or other color adjustment layers) and see the changes in the B/W as I make those adjustments.
Hi @Diane_Miller Lightroom Mobile doesn’t have a simple B&W conversion as far as I can tell. It’s my only option and I have to do it first, because when I’ve tried making adjustments first in color and then try changing it to B&W it changes everything to that preset which is very annoying. It makes me want to just go back to my original program, Pixelmator, I had way more control over what I could do, and I don’t have to pay anything because I already paid a one time fee for the app.
A quick web search reveals that you do have the basic color adjustments I’m talking about. Here are the steps. Forget about presets and do it this way:
Thanks so much, @Diane_Miller! OK, now I’m not so mad at Lightroom anymore! You’d think I was a hundred years old, with how untechnical I am. It’s probably because in my real job I have to be technical all the time and I think I was hoping that photography would be more like art, which it is, but there’s a lot of technical things to learn.
Think of it this way, as a photographer you are like a painter. The landscape is your canvas, the light is like your paint, and you decide where to place things on the canvas (your composition). Processing in Lightroom is like using a paint brush, its only a tool that helps you make things look the way your creative and artistic vision sees them. A landscape painter needs to know how to use different brushes to accomplish different purposes. That’s art, not technical because the what to do and why is much more important than the how (to do it). No one would say oil painting is technical, because you need to know how to use a brush to do it.
I see what you mean @Ed_McGuirk. I guess it’s just the way some people describe all the things they’ve done to their photo or what I should do with my photos that seems technical and maybe it’s just because I don’t understand it yet.