WC581 - Reflecting on Powell

That sounds like a great vacation. . .to be on a houseboat on Lake Powell. Very nice lines to the rocks and a beautiful color of blue in the sky and water. Centered comp works well with the reflections. I do wish there was a bit more brightness on the face of those rocks. Perhaps a slight brightening/contrast/saturation of just those rocks would help them pop more and show off their beautiful colors, lines, and texture. So peaceful looking . . .

I read and agree with Carolyn Derstein's comment on your image, and I too really love it. I tried an experiment with it in PS, first trying simple levels adjustment to bring out more detail from the mountain shadow and its reflection. That lightened up everything else too much and kind of ruined the drama.

Then I put it in ACR and tried adjusting the fill and sort of had success playing with fill, exposure, and recovery. But Mark Seaver suggested I look into luminance masks recently (see Tony Kuyper's site), and having written an action to generate the 12 masks he suggests, using the Ultra Dark one, I was able to pull up sufficient detail from the shadow without ruining the luminance in the rest of it. Just thought I'd throw that out in case you wanted to experiment with it. I do think it is helpful to have that detail, which is there and not clipped, as Carolyn Derstein suggested. You could probably do a lot better with a RAW file than I can with 8 bit depth jpg.

Thank you for your comments and giving thought to getting this image to show its merits. I have looked over Tony's Lum Masks and they looked a bit more complicated than I would want without more commitment. My current version of PS is not compatible also. For the most part I am using Lightroom 4 & Capture NX2. I can see that it could use a saturation brush across the rocks to get that color to pop a bit more. Thanks for the advice.