Shrine Ridge

Well, I'm a bit behind on processing images (again)... This is the only single-exposure shot of Shrine Ridge that I have time to process right now. I'll definitely be putting it on my schedule any year when the water level is decent - this was my first year up there.

That's nice, i really like the contrast with the flower in fg and light on the peaks behind! Just a tiny bit oversharpened for the tree (halo).

Les,,

It looks a little too warm on my monitor. Especially look into the sky.

Nice shot.

RV

It's very nice! Looks like there's either a sharpening thing or a shadow/highlight thing going on. My money's on the latter.

I saw that, too, Todd. It's on my original RAW conversion from ACR, so either something I did in ACR did that, or it's on the original. This was a quick process just because for all the talk of good conditions up there this year, no-one ever posted a shot...

I'll see if Nikon Capture resolves it. Richie - there's a good chance I've got color issues with it; my monitor's completely screwed up right now. Capture might give me a more accurate color rendition, too.

....for all the talk of good conditions up there this year, no-one ever posted a shot...

Hmmmmmm.
http://www.naturephotographers.net/imagecritique/bbs.cgi?a=vm&mr=20526&b=vf10&st=80&la=2079&ph=90&sid=31998&u=32379

One of the finest Shrine Ridge images that I've seen. I agree that it looks a tad oversharpened, but you've definitely got a winner here, Les.

Great shot!

Beautiful!

It was a good year up there, at least IMO compared to other years in my limited experience visiting the location (3 years). I know of a few other RMNPers who visited during the summer season but I suspect there is a lot of film left to be processed or digital captures yet to be tweaked in PP. You did a great job capturing the variety of colors that were up the ridge a little bit. Nice sunrise light too, it looks pretty natural to me. Be sure to show us how this looks after processing in Capture.

Oops, sorry there Doug! I've been a bit sporadic here lately and missed that.

Joshua, nice sunrise light and great close-up flowers on that shot!

Here's a rework. Still used ACR, but this time I did a 2-stop, 3-image blend from the one RAW image and color-corrected a bit. Capture for once didn't come out with a better initial image; it rendered the cloud highlights so yellow they were unrecoverable. (Artifacts around the tree on the right appear to be from JPEG; I did a lot of work along the border of that tree - I know it well. )

I think you're getting closer Les. However, IMO the second image needs a little more contrast and the shadows appear kind of blue. I reworked it a little in Photoshop CS2 by darkening shadows, and lightening midtones with levels, selecting the top half of the photo with selective color and darkening the blues and making them more yellow. I also added midtone contrast in the advanced shadow/highlight feature. This is an image well worth tweaking until you get it to your liking.

Thanks, Joshua. I went part of the way along the path you continued, but stopped a bit early; you've managed to pop the trees a bit more, which is the one thing I felt came up short in my rework. As I've said before, my monitor is a bit red, so your rework looks a little heavy in that direction to me - got to get a reliable monitor.