Cloudy Day, Fort Bragg

[bsanderson]

Glass Beach, Fort Bragg, CA

http://bobsanderson.com/images/forum/fortbragg.jpg

[hatmandue]

awesome!!

[Robert_Lay]

The histogram does not seem to agree with what we see. The breakers seem to be bone white with no detail, but the histogram does not show any significant build up of pixels at the right margin. That suggests that the highlights were blown out from overexposure and that PP was used in an effort to lower the high and mid values. The histogram also shows a great deal of loss of detail in the shadows - consistent with my suspicions above.

Perhaps you could confirm or explain this in some other way.

[bsanderson]

The histogram does not seem to agree with what we see.

I'm not sure I understand that. How are you viewing the histogram and how can it not agree with the photo?

Here's the original. Hopefully, that will answer your question. Feel free to modify it if you want.

http://bobsanderson.com/images/forum/fortbragg_orig.jpg

[Robert_Lay]

I can't see from the original or the PP'd version why it is that the breakers show no detail. It must be that they are so uniformly frothy that they carry smooth, homogenous values, making it look like they are blown out, which is clearly not the case now that we can see the original with its histogram. So, I retract my comments about the highlights.

Apparently, the process of improving the overall contrast of the image and possibly raising the saturation of the colors caused the deep shadows to go to solid black. That would account for what we see on the histogram.

Now that we see the original, it is clear that you have made considerable improvement to the image and brought out its best characteristics.

Congratulations!

P.S. I use the histogram in PSCS3 for evaluation of all images. One of the things that often happens in PP is that a tool such as the Brightness/Contrast tool is used to darken the high values in an image in order to lower their value. This results in highlights with a lower value, but they are still devoid of any texture or detail. I look for evidence of this and when necessary suggest that shooting RAW will allow you to recover better from blown out highlights and preserve detail.

[bsanderson]

One more try. This is this latest version.

http://bobsanderson.com/images/forum/fortbragg2.jpg

[Robert_Lay]

One more try. This is this latest version.


In my opinion your original post was far superior to this latest rendition, which I find too light.

[bsanderson]

In my opinion your original post was far superior to this latest rendition, which I find too light.

I think it's somewhere in between. I'll keep working on it.