Lake Sunrise

[big pix]

Early morning at lake MacQuarie NSW Australia.......

http://www.pixspot.com/albums/userpics/bsunrise.jpg

after an ajustment using curves and lab color

http://www.pixspot.com/albums/userpics/bsunrise3.jpg

[The Repro Kid]

That's great.

What camera and lens set-up are you using?

[big pix]

Nikon D70 and kit lens.........hand held shot........original shot in RAW and pp in photoshop

[Drexel469]

Very nice image (original) and the composition is very pleasing as well. The adjustments in Photoshop are a little much for the horizon and background on the water. That golden/yellow color looks to surreal and should be more like the original. The effect of the adjustment on the row boat in the foreground is prefect, it adds the right intensity of blue to the water and gives the boat a little punch too. You may want to mask out the middle to background and reduce the adjustment or work from the original raw to change your adjusstments. It is a very nice image and worthy of being printed if adjusted correctly.

Just my two cents. IF you were going for a more surreal look, godd job.

[aixtreme]

Very nice adjustments, but I agree it does look too surreal. But, if that was the look you were going for than kudos.

[The Repro Kid]

I like the color adjustments. Actual color when you're on the water, especially dawn or dusk, can be very surreal and it's hard to get a camera to catch all the different color variations.

[AdobeAce]

Hi All,

What's wrong with surreal? The results are absolutely beautiful.

If the original was ever printed in a magazine, it would fall flat. It would have been a very disappointing image.

The corrections make it come to life with a lot more detail and color range.

Ace

[Drexel469]

Nothing is wrong with sureal. The image is nice and you make a good point about the original image being reproduce in print. But the adjustments seem to flatten the image by reducing the light to dark range. It appears this way because Bigpix increased the saturation and luminosity of the background, this puts the foreground and background in competition. We can read the image as having foreground and background through size relation but the adjustments alter the light in the image thus slightly altering the relation between foreground and background. This is minor but it is something that was picked up on. Bigpix, you may or may not want to find an adjustment that falls somewhere between the original and altered image. Just a suggestion. Also I find the adjustments create a hard line between the mountain and sky, more so than in the original. This is very common in digital photograpy when adjustments are taken to far. It needs to be softened. Remember that things further back in space are softer due to "atmospheric haze".

[The Repro Kid]

...Bigpix, you may or may not want to find an adjustment that falls somewhere between the original and altered image. Just a suggestion. Also I find the adjustments create a hard line between the mountain and sky, more so than in the original. This is very common in digital photography when adjustments are taken to far. It needs to be softened. Remember that things further back in space are softer due to "atmospheric haze".

Creating masks over the adjustment layer is good for these cases. You can soften or wipe out completely areas you don't want to be affected, fill the mask from top to bottom with a gradient fill to ease the adjustment into the image, and/or use multiple adjustments each with it's own mask.

It does look a little flat but not too bad. The first thing I did when the image was first posted was download it and turn it to CMYK, like what ace was talking about. Surprisingly it changed very little. The oranges in the sky flattened a little bit, giving a bit more depth like Drexel thought it needed. I was impressed by the fact that there was almost no color sift upon conversion. That's actually why I originally liked the adjustments. -- I was all set not to like them if they did not convert well. And really, the conversion gave it a nice hint of more depth.