A little help on my picture....

Hi all,

I am a little brain fried on this one. Can someone give me input in term of what I can do to enhance this image more?? I don't do HDR, so I've use dodging on the foreground/shadow areas. I used a ND grad filter to help with the sky. I am happy with the sky, but for below part of the image seems dead to me. Maybe this image is just not meant to be? What do you think? Thank you!

Chun Ming

Chun.. overall I like the image and think it certainly could have potential. You definitely need to lighten up the image, because on my monitor it looks too dark. I can't make out a lot of the details in the foreground, as well the very top of the image. Maybe even consider doing a little tighter of a composition to bring out the bottom half of the image, because it looks like you have a beautiful scene down there, and you won't lose much from cutting the top 1/5th off. I hope this helps some.

Here's what I would do were this mine:
Create a duplicate layer
Select the foreground (everything but the sky).
Contract the selection by 1 pixel and feather the selection by 2 pixels. This will help eliminate any haloes occurring during the next step.
Check out the histogram for that selection and you'll see that it's slightly underexposed.
Open the Curves dialog and drag the center of the curve upward to taste. If that step saturates the foreground too much, change the layer blend mode from Normal to Luminosity so the colors aren't affected by the editing...just the tones.
Withe the foreground still selected, open your Unsharp Mask filter and try these settings:
Amount-20
Radius-50
Threshold-0
This won't sharpen the image at all, but instead gives it a bit more 'pop'.

Did you use a polarizer with your wide angle lens here? The sky looks like it has uneven polarization. Cropping out part of the sky per Koveh's advice seems a good idea.

Great scene.

I love the foreground, but have a problem with the sky.
For my taste, your ND Grad was MUCH too strong.

I agree with cropping the top and overall lightening the image.

This is a very nice nice, and with the above suggestions applied will really pop. I do agree with Bill on the sky though, the GND/CP was too strong on this occasion, cropping a little will help.

Interesting discussion. Use the scroll bar to help you determine how much sky to crop and then follow the technical editing suggestions to lighten the landscape and bring detail to the foreground.

Bill Brennan

John Mumaw has done it again!!! Just for grins I tried his technique and what a difference it makes to the bottom of the image.....I'd never even heard of using contract on an image before. Chun, you have a pretty good image here and with John's directions you can make the bottom "pop". Koveh's suggestion for cropping the top works well too. Not much you can do for the overdone sky but just those 2 suggestions have done a lot to fix this image. Try this and repost if you can.

Chun,

I think it would be easier to give advice if you could share the original. The order in which changes are applied matters. Usually setting tonality before changing saturation will help minimize posterization issues. But I would also lean towards John's recommendation based on what I see here at this point in the process.

The problems are luminosity based, so you could also build luminosity masks to address the curve masking precisely. I would recommend creating an RGB mask and then inverting it (you want to lift the dark tones). Then create another mask from the Red channel, invert it (this will highlight the dark blues) and subtract this mask from the first. You may have to paint out the clouds when you apply the mask.

I'm not at a computer right now to test this, so its a rough guess at this point. John's contrast increasing suggestion is valid and simple, but you can accomplish this through a curve as well.

Mel-

Thank you all for your input. This is my first stab at it, never worked Photoshop to that extend before since I try to not use post as much as I can, so some part is still "choppy". What do you think? I know I still have a lot of work to do if I want to make this out of something. Wish there were light hitting the mid-ground elements...

Also, John M., thanks for the steps! But how would I get rid of the "divider line" between the mountain and the sky? I know I must have done something wrong. Thank you.

http://lh5.ggpht.com/_15Jg7AAjHXU/TKzGWh_6TaI/AAAAAAAADZA/jVumofdW64g/s576/IMG_8031-3-2.jpg

That little USM trick can produce some nasty haloing like you're seeing. Drop just that step and see if it fixes it. You are using layers for non destructive editing, right? ;)

Ooooo, I'm saving that sequence John M ! So much I don't know about PS! I agree this is a very nice shot Chun. Something else you could try is to create a duplicate layer and then change the layer mode from Normal to Screen and adjust the opacity to taste. Next do John's trick with the Unsharp Mask at 50, 20, 0 then adjust saturations selectively.

Starting to look much better. The sky is starting to come together, but I think your foreground is now a little too bright. Not only given the scene (being sunset), but also your yellows are definitely blown. Check your histogram and you will see what I mean. Your starting to get the hang of it though, so just keep playing with the recommendations above. Cheers!

OK, here's my latest stab at it. I think I've got the masking thing much better. Thank you John M, Koveh, and everyone else!

From here on I'll go back to the old school dodging/burning techniques! I didn't do cropping on this one yet, I'll wait until the dodge and burn process is done.

http://lh3.ggpht.com/_15Jg7AAjHXU/TK0lg9Cy8QI/AAAAAAAADZE/so-FmYxoqPg/s576/IMG_8031-Edit.jpg

You're welcome!
Why would you want to return to dodging and burning?
Anyway, this one looks much better. I'm surprised to see the color in the clouds has vanished, though.

Yeah, I am still debating over that, maybe I'll tweek with it more.

Yup, looking much much better. I agree with John, don't ever do dodging and burning!!!