Luminous Landscape Forum

The Art of Photography => User Critiques => Topic started by: Neil Hunt on May 22, 2007, 05:54:38 pm

Title: Au Naturel or Not?
Post by: Neil Hunt on May 22, 2007, 05:54:38 pm

[attachment=2532:attachment][attachment=2531:attachment]Not too sure which, if either, are keepers. Photoshopped to within an inch of it's life or untouched but for a levels tweak and LCE? I'm thinking the straight version wins.

Title: Au Naturel or Not?
Post by: Jeremy Roussak on May 23, 2007, 03:29:02 am

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[attachment=2532:attachment][attachment=2531:attachment]Not too sure which, if either, are keepers. Photoshopped to within an inch of it's life or untouched but for a levels tweak and LCE? I'm thinking the straight version wins.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=119061\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

FWIW, if the "straight" version is the one on the left, I agree.

Jeremy

Title: Au Naturel or Not?
Post by: LoisWakeman on May 23, 2007, 07:41:52 am

The right one is definitely overcooked for my taste!

There is some noise (visible in the sky at least) on the left one that could be tweaked.

Title: Au Naturel or Not?
Post by: Neil Hunt on May 23, 2007, 04:51:59 pm

Its film grain not noise Lois. I like the texture of film, thats why I still use it, not that I have anything at all against digital!

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The right one is definitely overcooked for my taste!

There is some noise (visible in the sky at least) on the left one that could be tweaked.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=119160\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Title: Au Naturel or Not?
Post by: DiaAzul on May 23, 2007, 05:31:10 pm

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Not too sure which, if either, are keepers. Photoshopped to within an inch of it's life or untouched but for a levels tweak and LCE? I'm thinking the straight version wins.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=119061\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

[attachment=2541:attachment]


There is a long way you can go with photoshop without achieving a fuzzy blur over the original image, and many images can sustain a lot of photoshop work to achieve something new - though I appreciate it can be some way from what many people will find acceptable as 'photography'

Hope you don't mind me taking a pot shot at your image, following is the logic I was following to get where I did:

1...I like images to have a lot of contrast in them, so I often apply shadow/highlight to the image in order to improve local contrast. The objective is to get the image tonally balanced to my liking. You have a very strong bright patch in the middle and dark mountains, so I started using brightness/contrast with a shadow mask to localise the effect to shift the light/dark and high contrast parts of the image around.

2...I often then look at colour balance and saturation.

3...For fun I sometimes create a new layer, and apply a heavy noise filter to soften the image. Then paint back in detail from the original image on the layer mask.

Photoshoping an image to within an inch of its life is less about getting something you don't like and more taking the time to get something you do.