I appreciate the critiques, guys. I was hoping to have more prominent mountains, too. Yosemite is pretty hazey right now, but I'm happy with the literal rendering of the scene. And I'll need to look into a shutter release.
Bob, those are too sharp for me, but would you mind telling me your workflow? I watched Jeff Schewe run through PhotoKit sharpener in the Camera to Print tutorial, but it isn't released for Aperture at this point. Would the RAW file be helpful?
These are 20D shots that are nice and sharp. Getting to this quality of an image would make me very happy.
http://www.pbase.com/image/88724288
http://www.pbase.com/image/89357977
Hey thanks for the help, guys. It's a learning process!
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I was running through some video editing while reading the site in rendering moments, so I didn't put a lot of effort, just the basics for illustration,
In this case
level horizon - left to right is slightly downslope
crop- to repair rotation
levels - the pixels were barbelled, all on the ends - move the mid slider left to open lower zones
curves - tweek image, mostly from zone VI down, highlights too hot
Saturation-just a touch of saturation until grass looks like grass to me
Sharpening- in this case I just hit PK (sharpening is somewhat an artform, learn to use all well)
Creative sharpening - hit grass and boardwalk with a superfine brush
done with #1 time less than 2 minutes
#2 - selected sky
curves with strong slope to create contrast to pull mountain out w/o touching rest of picture - lots of ways to do this. Included some trees in contrast boost.
Walkway makes it a picture to me vs. a snapshot, I like the line working through scene,
I would spend more time on boardswalk if the shot were mine, and I had some pixels to work with.
All of this is basic stuff, you'll get the hang of it. The key is to see what you want first and attempt to pull, "YOUR" vision out of the file.
No magic formula. I just wanted to illustrate for you there was potential in your file. I've been to Yosemite on days like this. I can personnally connect with the haze more than when is everything is crystal clear, though I've seen both. But the world doesn't need another photograph of yosemite in perfect conditions.
Bob