Sunrise Flowers

Beautiful Image of a beautiful place. It does look like it could maybe use a bit of an increase in the contrast and saturation, imho. You might consider a crop from the top as well.

Carol,

They have mountains in Florida? Just kidding!

What a grand and refreshing view and landscape. This must be Glacier NP? Montana or that country just north?

Jeremy's comments are exactly what I was thinking as well. I think you have a beautiful landscape that could be made even better with some adjustments in PS. With your permission I'd like to post an attempt? My apologies upfront for making any assumptions, but if you're up for it, please let me know. I think this image could really pop.

Thanks for posting.

Lon

Carol,

This is a spectacular scene and I love the wildflowers in the foreground. From the shadows I see here, it looks like there was some pretty nice sidelight here. Polarizers work best at 90 degrees from the sun, so a polarizer may have helped the colors pop a little more, probably in the same way you remember them at the time. Also, the beautiful mountain scene occupies most of the lower half of the image and the upper half is mostly just blue sky. If you crop part of the top of the image, the mountains seem to loom larger and dominate the scene better. This forum is all about constructive criticism, so please understand I'm just trying to help you present the scene in the best possible light, as vivid as you remember it.

A lovely scene with a lot of potential, Carol. All the fellas took the words right out of my mouth, so can't add a thing to the advice you've already gotten for making this image sing alleluias. That's how I feel being out in great weather in places like this. This image can get there!

Thanks so much for the terrific comments and critiques.

Lon - You're absolutely right, this isn't Florida! It is Glacier, one of my favorite places on earth. I would love for you to post a rework of this image. I often hesitate to do too much processing to an image and then don't do enough. Just so you know what I have done, I processed this photo in LR, changed the Camera Profile to Camera Standard, used the grad filter on the sky and mountains, and cropped some off the left side so the tree would not be so centered. I can't wait to see what you do with it!

Michael: I did shoot this scene with a polarizer as well but, as often happens with a wide angle lens, it created very uneven colorations in the sky that I couldn't live with.

Thanks again everyone.

You got some great critiques already, I agree on a crop of the sky. Beautiful scene though, what a view.

I would wonder if "popping" the color and contrast of the foreground flowers and magnifying the ridges on the center mountain via increased contrast might note be in order.

the fisch

Thanks Carol. Remember this is more a personal choice than it is saying anything is "wrong" with the way you have processed this. My philosophy has been to make an image the "best that it can be" while trying to keep it "real."

I'm a big fan of Tony Kuyper's masks and actions and use most of them in my own workflow. For this image I added 4 adj layers. The first is a "wide mids" Levels adjustment layer to drop the overall brightness and increase contrast. The second layer is also a Levels adj layer only using the "dark darks" luminosity mask to darken the shadow areas about 25 pts; essentially darkening the image a bit more, but only selecting the darker values. The third and fourth layers are Tony's saturation adjustments to give this that extra "pop"

Also cropped some of the sky. This quality here is not as good as the original of course because I'm working from the already re-sized and sharpened web screen shot.

Just my take on it. It may or may not work for you. Hope it helps some though.

Lon

Lon, thanks so much for taking the time to rework my image. I really like what you did with it. Now it really pops! I'm going to have to check out Tony's masks and actions.

Hey, nice. This spot has been my backyard for several months of my life right here, but all of them in Autumn and Winter. Getting much closer to the flowers here would have added some more interest I think. If you could trade more flowers one way or another (wider angle pointed down, closer with more depth of field, etc.) for less sky I think that would be a slight improvement. I also agree I'd like a bit more saturation and contrast throughout. In this case, I make that adjustment and crop half the sky.