City - State - PENNSYLVANIA Country - United States
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Another version with slightly different editing. Still working through the raw editing workflow. The exposure was pretty much spot on so the order was as follows: Open in CS with camera raw. Adjust WB, saturation, shadows. In CS: correct levels, slight curve adjustment, new layer for color balance. Adjust midtone and shadows for correct balance as the original was very green due to deep shade and heavy overcast. Unsharp mask and resize for UF. Let me know what you think. BTW this was shot on tripod with self timer for sharpnes.
Great comment as always Hugo, I really appreciate your insight. As far as the color I had an interesting experience. I have compared the colors as opened in CS, as loaded to Usefilm and as printed at my local lab and all of them are different. One thing I realized from the print is that there is too much red in my final output. I boosted that a little to try to warm up the green cast a little more. I definitely need to get some calibration going on my primary monitor and stop editing on my laptop. The scene was very green and a light green at that with all the very early spring foliage in this shady gorge in Pennsylvania. Here on the east coast it's still a little early for the tress to develop that darker green. Thyanks again for the critique!
Thanks Chad. I agree in one sense with you. A perfect natural landscape would not need the added element of the flag and it could be argued it's out of place in that regard. That being said I could not pass up the opportunity to shoot this scene as it was. I was scouting locations for future and I only had about 20 min to setup and move on. I'm sure I'll return when the fall colors are peak to shoot this again. Thanks for the feedback.
First, Thanks for including the workflow and camera settings, very useful in assessing this image.
I agree with the excellent exposure, it's a very well taken photo, and shows a very good camera control. The wide DoF works well, too.
As to the post processing, I would prefer a more natural looking tone, the greens seem to be a bit excessive, and I'm not sure if that does justice to the beauty of the scene.
The workflow you describe pretty much include the steps I usually follow, but if you intended to produce a natural looking image, I think you could've tweaked the WB / colour temperature just a bit more. Another option is to play with the hues a bit in hue / saturation. Make sure you tweak the levels individually. That's also a way to reduce the green.
I think increasing the blue and cyan levels would also help in achieving that natural look.
Of course, that's only my 2 cents; if you deliberately intended the green image, please disregard...
I like this image very much, the overall feel is very sedate and relaxing. I can almost hear the water trickling down the stream. The only drawback for me is the flag hanging from the bridge. It seems very out of place to me. I'm a very patriotic guy... but this photo would be a 7 if the flag weren't there.
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