Newbie Advice C+C

I was out and about yesterday and shot this pic with a 10-22 lens on my 40d,any comments and advice would be great
thanks....Andy

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

Hello Andy;

First comment I'd make is that using f/20 on the 10-22 is overkill for this type of scene and is quite likely a cause of the soft image - caused by diffraction at small apertures... Generally, f/8, f/11 or at a push f/16 will generate the sharpest images... Play around with the f. stop settings and see how you get on...

Next, although the image is exposed correctly, it has resulted in some blown (looking) highlights - they're not in fact blown, but they need help to bring out the detail in the clouds... A CPL might have helped here, or a ND grad...

If you shot this RAW, you should be able to fake an HDR blend to make the most of the highlights and shadows... If not, you will need to play around with layers to bring these out... Failing all of that, a dose of Shadows & Highlights adjustments in PS will help...

The image also looks quite flat (to me anyway), so it needs some colour & contrast help to liven it up... finished off with some UnSharp Mask...

Here's a real quick play to show you what I mean... (EDIT : Saturation looks a little overdone, but that's easily fixable...)

Hope this helps;

Lee

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

Holding the camera not level is the cause of the converging verticals. It doesn't take much with such a wide angle lens.

The sky is a bit too featureless in the one extensive patch of cloud. Pity that it could not be a little more dramatic, but that is a minor nit-pick.

I like the 3 dimensionality enhanced by the interesting shrubbery in the foreground. That helps a lot and contributes to scale.

i like it much better without color saturation
i think its a great photo
do you have many others that are this good?

Took this pic last summer,converted to b&w then added a wood effect,does it work ? C&C welcome and appreciated...thanks
Andy

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

You can achieve better results (than I did) with your original, since jpg artifacting is clearly evident. I corrected the converging verticals, and barrel distortion, using PT Lens. I also did a little sharpening, as well as reducing exposure in the clouds.
_

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

Very good edit, LeuceDeuce!

Robert_Lay wrote in post #5721959
Very good edit, LeuceDeuce!

Thank you Robert. I'm resisting the temptation to make every image look like it was taken with Velvia film

Thats great LeuceDeuce any chance you could explain what you done in a little bit more detail i have got one or two others i would like to try
thanks Andy

ANDYSUDS wrote in post #5721981
Thats great LeuceDeuce any chance you could explain what you done in a little bit more detail i have got one or two others i would like to try
thanks Andy

Sure let me see what I can do here...

I used the program called PT Lens ($15) to correct the barrel distortion (it's an easy fix because you left your exif intact).

In the same program I corrected the converging verticals using the vertical shift slider. I eyeballed this correction, and using the Lens Distortion filter in CS3 I noticed I came up short.

I then finished the vertical correction in CS3 using Lens Distortion and aligning the verticals with the grid overlay.

Using a 2nd layer I reduced the exposure in the clouds and used a mask to limit the edit to the clouds on the right. This was to bring back a little texture to the large white area.

Small amount of contrast using curves.

Doing lens corrections reduces sharpness so I needed to apply a little. I find that images like this can take more of the dark halo than the light so I seperated the halos on different layers.

Sharpening technique: I created two copies of the background layer. On the first I applied USM at .5, 500, 0. Then I used Apply Image to apply a Lighten blend of the background layer to the sharpened layer. The effect is to remove all of the dark halo from the USM. I repeated the procedure with the 2nd copy only doing a Darken blend instead of lighten. This removed all of the light halo from this layer. I set the darken layer opacity to about 75%, and the lighten layer (top layer) to about 25%.

Thanks LeuceDeuce i will try this out with some of my other pics and post the results
thanks Andy