I'm a poorly lit landscape photo, please Photoshop me!

This is a a revised edit. I deleted my earlier post after deciding that the colors were way off, especially for the water. Hopefully, this is a bit better, but I still was a bit heavy handed on the sky colors trying to emphasize the sunrise/sunset (whichever it is).

No longer a quick edit, I created about seven layers each exposed differently. This edit also made use of Neat Image to clean up the considerable noise from two sources: shooting at ISO 800 and large tonal moves in PP. Finished up with a bit of shadow/highlight adjustment. Nobody else mentioned that the horizon had a considerable tilt in the original image, but I made a best guess at straightening it and then cropping to help the composition a bit and try to shift the horizon away from dead center.

HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/gif'

Love it, Bill.

Yeah, Bill. Nice work!

Thank you everyone for participating! I'm gonna put up another image today; I just love seeing all the different takes on PP..

But for now I'm going shooting!

Thanks for the compliments, Ook and shadowman.

Shadowman, I have a few recommendations for shooting low light landscape shots such as this. First, and most importantly, is that f/25 is not your friend on 35 mm style SLR cameras (if you have a view camera, then small aperture would be a different story -- Ansel Adams was the founding president of the "f/64 club" ). I recommend staying with apertures of f/11 and wider -- all the way down to wide open in some cases. I am not familiar with that particular EF-S lens you used or how sharp it is at fully open aperture, but if you ever get an opportunity to try out the L lens with a comparable zoom range, you will become an L junkie and ruined forevermore. Next, for low light shots such as this one, I would suggest using a tripod so that you won't have to deal with camera shake because of long exposure times. Finally, I would highly recommend using a lower ISO value in favor of longer exposure times and also larger apertures. For the focal length of 16 mm that you used, it would not be any problem to have a sharp image at f/8 or even f/5.6. I was a bit disappointed to see the ISO 800 noise on the 450D. Although a lot of the image was pulled out of the mud to get the desired brightness in my edit, I suspect that my XTi (a.k.a., 400D) has as good noise performance at ISO 800 (so maybe I will forget about upgrading for the time being).

Bill's is by far the best take on this pretty "blah" photo. He really brought some punch out without making it look ridiculously fake like some of the other edits.

Congrats!

bill boehme wrote in post #6744097
Thanks for the compliments, Ook and shadowman.

Shadowman, I have a few recommendations for shooting low light landscape shots such as this. First, and most importantly, is that f/25 is not your friend on 35 mm style SLR cameras (if you have a view camera, then small aperture would be a different story -- Ansel Adams was the founding president of the "f/64 club" ). I recommend staying with apertures of f/11 and wider -- all the way down to wide open in some cases. I am not familiar with that particular EF-S lens you used or how sharp it is at fully open aperture, but if you ever get an opportunity to try out the L lens with a comparable zoom range, you will become an L junkie and ruined forevermore. Next, for low light shots such as this one, I would suggest using a tripod so that you won't have to deal with camera shake because of long exposure times. Finally, I would highly recommend using a lower ISO value in favor of longer exposure times and also larger apertures. For the focal length of 16 mm that you used, it would not be any problem to have a sharp image at f/8 or even f/5.6. I was a bit disappointed to see the ISO 800 noise on the 450D. Although a lot of the image was pulled out of the mud to get the desired brightness in my edit, I suspect that my XTi (a.k.a., 400D) has as good noise performance at ISO 800 (so maybe I will forget about upgrading for the time being).

Thank you very much for the advice. I have come to understand Aperture quite a bit in the recent weeks. I am quite aware of the mistakes made with that photo.. (i picked a "blah" photo because I figured it was a good basis for a level comparison of different PP preferences) In this particular instance I was simply not paying attention... Rookie mistake!

I too am disappointed with the ISO noise. It's almost a deal breaker for me.. I love shooting in low light natural conditions but it's very difficult with the xsi even with my 2.8 24-70..

sue.t wrote in post #6740442
......Really wanted to straighten the picture, but didn't.

bill boehme wrote in post #6742127
..... Nobody else mentioned that the horizon had a considerable tilt .....

oops, sue.t mentioned it. Sorry.

taylorwilsdon wrote in post #6744123
Bill's is by far the best take on this pretty "blah" photo. He really brought some punch out without making it look ridiculously fake like some of the other edits.

Congrats!

Thanks, but it's embarrassing to admit that much of my Photoshopping skills were developed because of the need to rescue a lot of my bad images. I wanted to make the top edge of the sky even darker, but I had already pushed the tonal range on the sky to its useful limit and any further adjustments made banding stick out like a sore thumb.

I wouldn't call any of the edits "fake" looking. They are all just various ways of trying to salvage a very dark image which sometimes means employing a technique or some favorite "effect" that modifies the way that an image gets interpreted by the viewer. Sometimes, it is necessary to try various approaches to see what sticks since there is no one size fits all answer to fixing images.

shadowman wrote in post #6744434
I too am disappointed with the ISO noise. It's almost a deal breaker for me..

Keep in mind that having to lighten up a dark image like this results in much more noise than the properly-exposed frame would. Not sure if you're talking abut the 450D in general, or this specific frame.