Attached is a shot I did several months ago, and would appreciate critique.

Some times I look at this and really like it. Other times the noise / fringing is too distracting for me and I do not like it. Given the subject matter, it might be that the noise is acceptable.

I would appreciate some thoughts - does this shot "work"?

Thanks for your help.
Dave

Hi Dave,

In general I like this shot. The subject matter and the time of day work for me. I like the colors in the sunset and in the grass area in the middle of the foreground area.

The thing that I find distracting are the two plants/bushes/cacti on the right side of the image. They are very high contrast and draw my attention away from the rest of the shot.

I held a piece of paper against the image on screen at about the halfway point blocking the right side in essence making a vertical crop on the cacti on the left and like it better. What do you think?

i had pretty much the same reaction as joe, above. the cactus (or whatever it actually is) somehow doesn't look right. i can't say exactly what it is, but your eye IS immediately drawn to it, & even when you force yourself to look at the rest of the image, your eye is pulled back to that plant.

& it's really a shame, too. cuz i think the rest of the image kicks butt.

jp

Dave...dude....not sure what you did to this shot...but man...the cutlines between the foreground objects and the colorful sky look pretty harsh. Huge artifacts around the cacti and the other vegitation. I also see mushyness and color artifacts in the lower vegitation. The right cacti (the teddy bear cactus) seems to be bright and lit from the front...almost pasted in place. (although I know it isnt) while the background saguaro cactus look silloueted.

If I were forced to guess what is happening.....I would say this is your first attempt at a digital blend to get some forground information matched up with the sky....as I know both would have been difficult to capture as one image due to the Dynamic Range.

Would be happy to help you out in figuring out how to get this righ....its an awesome shot...just needs some TLC.

Roman

Dave,

You know I didn't really want to comment on this because I am up at my cabin at Donner Pass, and all I have is my laptop. I thought maybe all the artifacts I was seeing, were somehow due to my uncalibrated small screen. The composition here is great and everyone knows how exciting it is to catch such a great sunset.

I agree with everything said by the other posters and especially with Roman's view that this is some kind of a blend that didn't really work. It looks way oversharpened on my laptop screen and halos and CA on the Saguaro on the right are extreme. Could part of this been a problem with downsizing for the web?

Anyway, great composition and emotional content. Technically though, it could use some work.

Thanks for posting.

George

Thanks for the comments everyone. This is a shot that was exposed to have the foreground Silhouette (black), but to bring out the sunset. That shot is ok, but in some respects kind of a standard cactus sunset picture....

I wanted more, so changed the exposure in PS RAW - and this brought out the foreground details and I liked the shot much better - but of course it then had associated artifacts from the underexposed foreground. I like the "emotion" of this shot much more than the Silhouette shot, so kept playing with it.

Does anyone want to use this as a Photoprocessing challenge? I would love to send it out and see what everyone can do with it. Let me know, and if so I will figure out how to get the Raw file to you.

Thanks again for responding.
Dave

Sign me up Dave......would love to take a crack at it.

Roman

That would be great Roman. I sent the file to the email address on your PBASE website. I know the foreground is really underexposed so hopefully you can do something with it. Unfortunately I did not bracket exposures.

I would appreciate if you could describe what you do as much as possible.

Thanks for taking this on.

If anyone else wants to work on this let me know.

Dave

Ok...here is my take on it. Lightened the foreground JUST enough to get some detail....but not enough to bring out the boogey man (noise).

Did a dual blend to keep both areas within their acceptable light range...using my standard blend technique.



Roman

Thanks again Roman,

This is certainly more pleasant - the harshness has been removed and this is a great improvement. I think it still captures much of the emotion I was looking for. I am going to go back to the file and see if I can get similar results - I will probably also play with the cropping and straightening.

I do wish I could bring more of the foreground out, but recognize that I should have exposed once for the foreground, once for the sky, and blended the two together.

I would appreciate if I could ask one question. One thing I struggled with was getting the selection on the foreground (particularly the needles on the cactus on the right side) so I could isolate it from the sky. Did you use the color range selection for that? Are you sampling colors from the foreground first - then applying that selection? Or is it in the fuzziness slider? I can never seem to get the right combination of settings to get the selection I want. Any additional advice you can provide on this will be appreciated.

Thanks so much for all your help - you are really helping me improve my PS skills.

Dave