Thanks everyone for your input.
It will be seen by many as over saturated and not "realistic" but I think the treatment suits the image perfectly. Well done. Personally I don't go back and forward tweaking an image mainly because you usually end up making it worse and you lose focus of what you wanted in the first place.
Thank you. The tweaks I tend to make aren't major and as I have a master PSD file saved with 'non-destructive editing' it is relatively easy to tweak without losing too much focus IMO.
It is just how I prefer to work, but I know others are different.
It is a great composition and the shutter speed is just right to maintain some detail in the water.
But the general foliage does seem a bit yellow to me. I recently attended a talk by a landscape photographer and he said he routinely drops the intensity of the yellows because (to his eye) a scene heavy with greens seems to fool the camera and overdo the yellows. When I have tried it, it seems to work for me a lot of the time.
I see a lot of people have mentioned the colour balance and I completely agree. I think this was one aspect that I have done poorly. It was sunrise time and there was a really nice golden glow in the background that was hard to capture accurately. I wanted to show the glow off in the photo but I have found it hard to get right.
The photo worth the pain of a better processing.
In this case slightly lower local contrast and a dual WB will work very well.
Keep the current WB for the foreground/falls and decrease Color Temp for background.
Very easy if you use Lightroom.
Have a Nice Day.
Thierry
Thanks. The contrast was another thing I have been tweaking. My original edit was higher contrast in areas and looked too overdone. I then went back to try and selectively control the contrast in various areas. I think it looks better than my first edit, but still some parts (like the rocks just at the top) are very high contrast and I could possibly ease up on the blacks. (again I'm not 100% convinced I need to though!)
Beautiful shot, everything seems perfect although the top of the frame is very yellow/green. Try the suggestions made by Thierry/Mike!
By the way, where was it in Chamonix?
Thanks, I am going to try colour balance it in different ways and see how it turns out. Like I said I really wanted to emphasise the glow, but I don't think I did it as well as I would like.
This was a little stream on the path between chamonix town and La Floria. I walked up to La Floria early to get some MW shots over the mountain range. On the way back I spotted this stream and couldn't pass up on taking a few shots).
Adjustments -> Selective Color -> Yellow +10% cyan
Adjustments -> Shadows/Highlights -> Highlights circa 50%, tone circa 40%, Radius circa 40%
Adjustments -> Vibrance -> Saturation +20%, Vibrance -40-60%
Results in this image, which really is just my taste and preference, each persons will be different.
Thanks for your ideas. I like the look of your shot but with the cooler colours I don't feel it quite captures how I felt it looked at the time I shot it.
The other difficulty I am facing is that I am travelling and have a laptop that doesn't have the best screen - I found in the past when I edited shots on this vs my usual screen I colour balanced images differently.
I think this is a really good composition - I like the image very much.
IMHO you've managed to create an "intimate" and appealing portrait of a small waterfall, that is interwoven with interesting detail from the surroundings. Whereas most waterfall images we see are more macro images of larger waterfalls.
I agree with the others that the top portion is a bit yellowish. However, personally, I kind of like the surreal-enhanced-spring-feeling it gives. You might try an alternate rendering, as some herein have suggested. But I certainly would not cast aside the rendering you already have.
Thank you. I really like small streams/waterfalls. Obviously large ones are great too, but like you say, the intimate feeling is quite nice.
Beautiful photograph, Sanjeev.
I would prefer to see the lower near-white parts of the water just a hint brighter/livelier.
Did you compose one from perhaps ½ a metre back or slightly wider or possibly from slightly right of this one? I feel the close cropping is robbing me of enjoying just a little more of the tree in the top left and the rich detail throughout.
Thanks. I will give your suggestion a go.
I did not unfortunately! I was in a rush to get back to the apartment - I was already running late, and taking the time to take this shot was pushing it a little. So I quickly tried a few compositions and ran around up and down the stream like a madman until I found this one I liked. And it was the only composition I got.
I did find some ridiculously awesome compositions in my time in chamonix. Most of them I didnt get to make the most of because it was midday when I found them. But if anyone is going there I have some great tips in mind!
I like what maddog did with the water, especially losing the blue tinting but feel he lost too much of the BG glow...somewhere in the middle would be my taste...but then I like warm colors.
Thanks Chris. Yeah, like I said - the background glow is a big part of what I wanted to portray.
