I don't know... some might think that this is a little over manipulated-looking, but after a first pass I kinda like it. Any takers?

[Sailor]

Looks fine to me - terrific composition.

Jer

[sealonsf]

Lovely scene. I like it.

[charliezap]

I like the look.Good shot.--charliezap

[Jimbo]

With or without thw guy its a great image. I may have adjusted the WB a bit as their is a lot of blue Hue unles that's what you seen. not over cooked at all/. Well done. JIM

[GeoJerry]

Thanks guys, I guess I'll go ahead and give it another star.
Thanks for the comment on WB. Maybe a little too blue so I tweaked it a bit and that helped.

[Schraubstock]

Hi

I agree, a bit too blue which negates the soft green on the slopes of the far hills on the other side of the lake. And the illumination of the foreground rocks looks more like the colour of moonlight than sunlight.

Perhaps just a teeny-weeny bit over-detailed but the image can live with it, no problems. Otherwise a terrific shot.

Greetings

[daacon]

Nothing wrong with this shot at all , very good pp , nice detail , man to show scale ,lovely colors. Well done!

[slowpez]

I like it also. Very well done.

[GeoJerry]

Hi

I agree, a bit too blue which negates the soft green on the slopes of the far hills on the other side of the lake. And the illumination of the foreground rocks looks more like the colour of moonlight than sunlight.

Perhaps just a teeny-weeny bit over-detailed but the image can live with it, no problems. Otherwise a terrific shot.

Greetings

Ah... the foreground lighting was one thing that bugged me too. Actually, that's the real lighting. This picture was taken around 1 PM, and the sky was pretty harsh. So I reached into my sky collection and masked this one in instead. The sky picture was taken in late afternoon looking east, while this one is looking south. I think that accounts for the unworldly look, which is starting to grow on me.

Not sure what you mean by over detailed.... you mean over sharpened?

[GeoJerry]

Dave, Susan... thanks!

[Schraubstock]

Ah... the foreground lighting was one thing that bugged me too. Actually, that's the real lighting. This picture was taken around 1 PM, and the sky was pretty harsh. So I reached into my sky collection and masked this one in instead. The sky picture was taken in late afternoon looking east, while this one is looking south. I think that accounts for the unworldly look, which is starting to grow on me.

Not sure what you mean by over detailed.... you mean over sharpened?

Hi

You wrote: "...this is a little over manipulated-looking..." and from this I assumed you were using HDR software which provides tone mapping of colours to one another in order to create the appearance of an image with high dynamic range. Such software in many cases also provide a way to set an amount of detail strength by which this mapping can be varied.

This is quite different from sharpening an image were edge contrast is manipulated. (Generally speaking, or though some sharpening tools these days do a bit of dynamic range adjustment as well.) FocalBlade springs to mind.

That you were approaching the limit of your image manipulation can be seen by the white halo that starts to appear around the figure standing against the sky. Which also makes me think it was a JPG format you did the PP work on as these sharpening artifacts are typically a JPG problem.

As to the colour of the image ? I am not 100% convinced. I just think it is a smidgen too blue overall, (not a lot) but that is just me. Oh and one more thing, don't be too sure you remember accurately what you saw as far as colour is concerned when you took the shot. Memorising colour (accurately) is a tough job for a brain. Do a test, pick a colour of an object around your house then go (two days later) to your local paint shop and take home a colour swatch from a paint manufacturer you thing matches the colour of the object back home. You will be surprised.

Greetings

[GeoJerry]

Schraubstock,

Thanks for the in-depth comments. You hit on another aspect of this picture that bugged me, and that's the halo. The combination of the halo and the ambient light direction versus masked sky lighting wes what I was referring to as "over-manipulated."

The image was actually processed as a RAW - there is no JPEG conversion anywhere in the sequence - and there was no HDR processing. All of the processing was done in Aperture, including some sharpening, with one important exception: the sky was done in OnOne's Perfect Mask module. Here is where the halo came from: it appeared during the masking process. I actually spoke to OnOne about this, and apparently it's the result of Perfect Mask's inability to mask cleanly when the boundary between the mask and the original is either not sharp or of low contrast. Notice on the rocks that there is no halo, because the contrast is sharp. On the person and on the mountains to the left, the halo exists because the darkish masked sky is too close in tone and color to the original pixels at the boundary. There is a threshold tool in Perfect Mask that attempts to control this but I don't find it's very effective. There are keep/drop tools that can be used to counter this, but again they don't discriminate very well when similar colors/tones are in play. Perfect Mask provides a blunt force chisel tool which lets you carve pixels out one at a time, so I could fix this.... if I had the motivation. :-)

FYI, here's the original, fresh out of the camera:


By the way, that's not a lake, it's a stretch of the California coast just north of Big Sur and south of Carmel. If you look closely you can see the famous Bixby Bridge in the background.

[Schraubstock]

Hi Jerry

I enjoy a rational exchange of ideas and opinions which your thread provides.

And I am glad you provided an original untouched original albeit in JPG format (the only way you can post it here) which limits any sort of corrections one can do. Nevertheless this original takes us back to basics which is always a good starting point. Coming in at the tail end of an image which had undergone already some pretty severe, shall we call them enhancements, never is a good idea.

And of course woe betide those who criticize a heavily colour enhanced image. We all like strong powerful colours, don't we. And there still is a very strong believe that a mediocre picture can be made great by bumping up colours. Yours, I may hasten to add, however is not such an image.

Now having said this, your original image clearly, according to all the image manipulation programs I own, shows that the white balance of the camera did nor get it right. There is definitely a hint of blue cast present.

I started off by removing this slight blue cast and took the image trough a sequence of corrections which I will document below by way of several enclosures.

Image No.1) As you posted it
Image No.2) The result of removing the slight colour cast. For this I used several programs with the same result. Nothing else was done.
Image No.3) I used Viveza (Nik Software) to increase brightness in the foreground rock area only, and increase saturation a wee bit.
Image No.4) Here I imported the image into OLONEO, selected "Tone Mapping" and increased the strength to +10 and "Detail Strength" to +53, then went into the yellow channel and increased "Hue/Luminance" by a small margin.

As to the blue sky, I have not touched this at all. In this case though it would be easy with the clean defining lines to "slip in" some nice sky from some other shot.

As you can see I did not touch any colour directly and as such the image essentially is still a "basic image" You can now play around with individual colours to change the image further but by coming from the basic colour values you will always finish up with a pleasing result. But when you make colour changes I would like to instill in you the urgency to go lightly and resist the temptation to overdo it.

I am an old bugger from the film days where corrections, as we can make them now with modern software, were not possible as we know it today. We took picture that had to stand on their own feet, so to say. Nevertheless, in today's world of digital photography we can do all these things now, and don't get me wrong I am in it like everybody else. from time to time though I have to remind myself not to go overboard with picture enhancements.

Nice talking with you
Greetings

[GeoJerry]

Shraubstock,

Wow, thanks for taking so much time on this picture. This is exactly why I posted it on here, because I had some misgivings about it and wanted to get some technical feedback. I agree with you on the WB, as your #2 is definitely an improvement. Your #3 is pretty similar to what I took into Perfect Mask, except I used Aperture to do the dodging in the foreground cliff, and my color saturation was about the same.

When I masked in the sky, I saw that because of the lighting conflicts the image now took on a bit of a surreal look. At first I didn't like it, but then I decided to run with it. After going back into Aperture I cranked up the color a bit in the foreground and in the water. I reason that once you've departed from a realistic image, you now have free rein to get a little wild. :-) But you're right to point out though that we all need to be careful about saturation, and like you I really don't like excessively saturated images (the postcard look). Maybe in the quest for the artsy surreal look I took more liberties with color this time, but if I do ever get around to working on this picture I'll probably back down on the color a bit, somewhere between yours and mine. This after all is just a matter of taste.... within ranges.

The bigger problem is the masking. As I said, my image going into masking looked a lot like your #3, so I think your #3 would likely encounter the same halo problems if you were using Perfect Mask. But maybe you have superior masking software? If you want to have a go at this, I'd be happy to send you the RAW! :-) I'd like to see if I could get the surreal look but without looking overly manipulated.

Thanks again.