Monsoon Country Part II

I know this is always fairly subjective stuff, but IMO this looks like too much processing of the sky to me, resulting in an unnatural contrast and lots of noise visible. I'd probably just start over there since it must have been a clean file at one point from ISO 100. The foreground areas seem too purple to my eye around the open rock areas. The shadows have been brought up there too much as well - note the fact some shadow areas below are just as light as the highlights in the sun - some balancing is required for a natural look.

All and all, it's a very pretty scene and one worth working on. However, it looks like process needs some adjustment in this case. Pay particular attention to where the light levels want to go naturally, what the colors are doing from start to finish and watch out for that noise. Hope that helps! I know it's a tough chore to get it all to come together sometimes, but it's worth it.

I think Marc has some excellent suggestions for this image, Jake. The drama and light in this scene definitely make this worth reworking.

Ed

Thanks Marc, for your valuable suggestions. I had a PSD saved with all the layers and alpha channels, so I just tried to rework it there. Here is what I came up with. Let me know if the changes are too subtle.

Seems the second has similar problems, though altered slightly. Less noise, but it's so small I can't tell much. I still think the sky needs reworking, but not only for noise but also contrast and the color variations. The shadows are still really bright and washed out in places (two hills in the shadow at left and below the beams at right) and the foreground is now blue, not purple (note the rusty volcanic reds in Shane's version). I'd be really interested to see the RAW file here and work on it a bit myself.

Marc, I'm off to work right now, but if I would love to e-mail you the RAWs if you would send me your e-mail address?

I think Marc is spot on with his comments, but this is so worth revisiting. A great scene.

I sent you an email.

Hi Jake, I can't add much more the Marc's thoughtful and tactful critique. One would need to see the out-of-camera RAW to be able to gauge where one can go with this. It certainly does seem like you pushed it on many fronts in terms of processing...and it's all fine if that was your objective to get a sort of 'psychedelic' colour palette...but if your aim was to faithfully/naturally convey the display of light, layers and colours before you it probably didn't work out like even you intended? The most obvious thing colour-wise the near-purple ground which just seems off?

I would be interested to see how Marc works with this one if you were prepared to send him the RAW...he is a master

Hi Jake,

I echo the other's comments. Is your monitor properly calibrated, and is it a proper photo editing monitor? A couple of years ago I used a laptop monitor, and even though I had calibrated it, I realised when I got a proper photo editing monitor that the images were quite far off in color to what I had intended, although they looked fine on my laptop monitor.
Its worth putting the work in on this one!

Cheers,
Christoph

What the others said. Id like to see a reworking of this cause its a nice scene with great light. Hopefully you have the original, if you can start with something as clean as possible then you can probably get a lot more clarity and attractive colors out of this.

I will write you an email and send full resolution files to you tomorrow to explain what I did here. I basically just painted different layers together for all sorts of various things from three files and dodge/burned. This took about 20 minutes. There's no noise at all and all levels look good on Firefox. It was indeed some difficult light to work with. Thanks for taking the correct exposures to pull it off!

The light looks fairly accurate to my eye in this rework, but it's worth noting there's very little 'clarity' here to begin with (the foreground is pushed as far as it can go IMO) thanks to hazy conditions and a long lens. This might not be readily apparent to those commenting.

Marc's repost simply shows how important processing is in todays image-making. great job...

I believe the lack of processing is equally, if not more important to today's image making. The problems I see are often caused by over-doing than not doing enough. There's so much we can do it's easy to get carried away.

Thanks for re-working this, Marc! The all around color balance looks much more consistent, the noise is definitely now a non-factor. I think you are right about processing allowing us to take things to far, something that I was not taking into consideration. Can't wait to try my hand at this one again! Many thanks, Marc, I look forward to reading your e-mail.

Wow--quite a transformation! That Adamus dude knows what he's doing, i think