Long Exposure Processing - Critique

Hi Folks,

I have been getting into long exposure photography quite a bit recently and I was wondering if I could get some critique on the images below. For some reason I am not entirely satisfied with the processing I have done but I can't see the best way to correct them.

They were all taken with a 10 stop B&W an a Lee 0.6 ND Grad Soft for the Bow Fiddle Rock (image 1).

The 2nd and 3rd images are the same, just one is in B&W and the other in colour. I noticed on the colour image has some coloured vignetting in the top right, which I am guessing is a result of stacking filters?

Any advice would be appreciated (both processing and technique) and editing of these is allowed.

Cheers,
Andy

IMHO the shooting technique and PP on the color ones is spot on...B&W doesn't work.
Including the shore line doesn't help the first one.
You've got the technique down pat...work the scene to come up with the perfect vantage point.

chauncey wrote in post #17884097
IMHO the shooting technique and PP on the color ones is spot on...B&W doesn't work.
Including the shore line doesn't help the first one.
You've got the technique down pat...work the scene to come up with the perfect vantage point.

Agreed. Technique and color processing look fine to me.

In the first one, I'm slightly distracted by the difference in lighting between the foreground rock and the center rock - the rock with the colorful moss in drab and shadowed. Not really something you can fix in post, but something that you could shoot at a different time of day.


You could also experiment with a slightly-overdone look, with saturation boosted up and shadows lifted to make the greens really, um, "pop" for lack of a better word.

Thanks for the comments.
I see what you both mean about the shoreline, I have tried to crop the first one into a square format and it does look a bit better but the rock still seems quite bright to me. I have tried adjusting the exposure for it but nothing is working for me.

Nathan, I did reprocess to give a "pop" effect and made the colours jump out. Also it took me a bit of time to work out how to remove the magenta cast in the top right. I eventually managed something in photoshop with masks. Much easier than in Lightroom. I can see that the original one above looks "flat" when compared to this one.

I like that one a lot. For this style of photography, I think unnaturally-saturated works nicely. The overall cooler/greener (less magenta) was a good idea too.

Did you try gradient filters in Lightroom?

nathancarter wrote in post #17885450
I like that one a lot. For this style of photography, I think unnaturally-saturated works nicely. The overall cooler/greener (less magenta) was a good idea too.

Did you try gradient filters in Lightroom?

Thanks Nathan. I did try the grads in Lightroom but I couldn't get rid of the magenta cast easily. If I can't fix it in Lightroom, Photoshop is the answer. Most of the adjustment work was done in Lightroom with a few bits in Photoshop.

I will try and upload my other image later on to see if the crop works.