Eric, I have no idea what the original looked like, but this looks way way over-saturated to me. I have a difficult time keeping control of the saturation abilities of Photoshop sometimes...... I'd look at reworking this to be more natural, in my opinion.
I concur. Oversaturating was a real problem for me. I've been going back and reworking LOTS of my old images because of it. Don't worry, soon those tiny steps will start becoming larger!
Thanks guys, Mark---I'm way deep in David Blatner and Bruce Fraser Real World Photoshop CS, at $50 and 850 pages it might occupy me for a while, I'll be looking for the Haynes book too. Re: saturation, I've actually saturated in the scanner before sending to Photoshop, before I did that it was, well, gray. Is saturation a matter of individual taste, or what? Oh and the sky---it's a paint job after the original was badly blown out and vignetted by polarization. Does the sky make you say "too saturated"?
Eric,
First of all I'm glad to see you finally got rid of the black boarder. As for the image, its better than your previous post.Maybe you should save the saturation adjustments for photoshop where you have more control. Now for the sky, If you were going to go through all that trouble to change the sky, wouldn't you want to do it with clouds of something more than a plane blue sky. I'm almost wondering if a blown out sky might look better. The sky here looks unnatural because it's just one tone and we all know that a sky's color and brightness changes from the horizon up. It also adds to the overall oversaturated look. One other thing, those shadows look real dark. Is there anyway to pull any detail out of them?
Thanks Erik, I'm assured that there are ways to pull detail out of those shadows but it's way ahead of my present learning curve. As to sky, the place involved actually creates these skies, very blue (maybe it's the humidity, I don't know) and cloudless, so the huge emptiness and perceptible color of the sky becomes almost a presence in itself. Incidentally the sky color is not uniform, I found that out with some of the new photoshop toys, it looks uniform but is a range of colors, I forget what the range was, 60 out of 250 or so????
Thanks for the guidance. Maybe I'll post again with (1) saturation ratcheted down, (2) detail lovingly recovered in the shadows, and (3) I don't know what I'll do with the sky. I promise you though, blown out sky would not be an improvement, nor would world-class vignetting.
When you get into heavy editing it becomes more like illustration - knowing how light, textures, surfaces and forms look will really help the end result look more realistic.
Discussion
7 repliesJerry
Hey Mark, how's that hillside coming?
First of all I'm glad to see you finally got rid of the black boarder. As for the image, its better than your previous post.Maybe you should save the saturation adjustments for photoshop where you have more control. Now for the sky, If you were going to go through all that trouble to change the sky, wouldn't you want to do it with clouds of something more than a plane blue sky. I'm almost wondering if a blown out sky might look better. The sky here looks unnatural because it's just one tone and we all know that a sky's color and brightness changes from the horizon up. It also adds to the overall oversaturated look. One other thing, those shadows look real dark. Is there anyway to pull any detail out of them?
Thanks for the guidance. Maybe I'll post again with (1) saturation ratcheted down, (2) detail lovingly recovered in the shadows, and (3) I don't know what I'll do with the sky. I promise you though, blown out sky would not be an improvement, nor would world-class vignetting.
Here's the ones I liked.
When you get into heavy editing it becomes more like illustration - knowing how light, textures, surfaces and forms look will really help the end result look more realistic.