meadow

[Seb]

Hi all,

I haven't been posting for quite a while. I blew dust off the D70 and went for an hike this afternoon. Here is a scene that catched my attention among others.

I promise I'll post more in the days to come.

regards

Seb

[gahspidy]

Seb, I like the dreary desolate mood you captured and the tall vertical stalk breaking over the horizon is effective, Sky is moody as well. My only want in this image is for a bit more light in the foregound. The image is a bit dark overall on my screen. Great job composing this scene into a moody dreary image.

[Chunk]

I wonder how it would look with more green in the conversion. What method id you use? I'd try to have more detail and highlites among the cattails. I like the position of the snag. Perhaps a little more contrast in the sky would also help.

[Seb]

I wonder how it would look with more green in the conversion. What method id you use? I'd try to have more detail and highlites among the cattails. I like the position of the snag. Perhaps a little more contrast in the sky would also help.

Hello Chunk,

Thanks for commenting. I kinda screwed that one lol. Actually, I started with the channel mixer and mostly put blue in the conversion (30% red, 20% green, 50% blue). I kinda liked the effect but I decided to apply a first multiply layer to the sky only to bring out more details. Then I burned and dodged the sky to retrieve some more details. Finally, I went to save for the web but the preview looked way too bright as I forgot to convert the profile to sRGB.... my bad....). Anyway, I decided to apply one more multiply layer to the entire frame to darken it some more and it turned out to be too muted. I'll start from scratch and post a second version.

Thank you for your interest.

Seb

[Seb]

Seb, I like the dreary desolate mood you captured and the tall vertical stalk breaking over the horizon is effective, Sky is moody as well. My only want in this image is for a bit more light in the foregound. The image is a bit dark overall on my screen. Great job composing this scene into a moody dreary image.

Thanks Gary, I do see your point. Look out for my second version.

Seb

[Seb]

I started from scratch for this second version.

Seb

[megan]

Seb -

The sky is really dramatic and wonderful. Is there any way you can pump up the contrast so it's a little more accentuated?

Good catch.

Megan

[megan]

Ignore my post! I like to post first, and read responses later, so my first reaction isn't tinged by other opinions.

I do like the second version better.

[EOSThree]

This one doesn't really do anything for me, I feel like I am not seeing enough of the scene. I am looking hard for an interesting subject and the small tree in the midground isn't doing it for me. The sky has some interest but not enough to carry the photo. The lighter second version is much better looking, but still it doesn't hold my interest. I haven't done any B+W conversions and your conversions look pretty good to me, I would be interested in learning how you go about the conversion.

[Seb]

This one doesn't really do anything for me, I feel like I am not seeing enough of the scene. I am looking hard for an interesting subject and the small tree in the midground isn't doing it for me. The sky has some interest but not enough to carry the photo. The lighter second version is much better looking, but still it doesn't hold my interest. I haven't done any B+W conversions and your conversions look pretty good to me, I would be interested in learning how you go about the conversion.

Hello EOSThree,

Thanks for your straight forward comment. There were quite a couple of steps involved for this one. First of all I manually adjusted levels on the background layer (something that I haven't done on the first version and it clearly helped to maximize contrast).
Then, I created an adjustment layer for the channel mixer and this is were I did the conversion, simulating an orange filter this time ( 65% red, 25% green, 15% blue).
Then, I created a duplicate layer from the background layer and set it to multiply with a strenght of 40% or so. This allow to enhance the visual impact of the clouds but it also darken the picture as a whole quite a lot so I erased that layer on the foreground to bring it back to its original status. Only the sky and the trees line remain affected. Then, I felt that the foreground could use some more light so I sightly dodged it on the background layer. Finally, I flatened the image and voila.

This was quite an intuitive process. I had a general idea of the kind of image I wanted to have but I didn't exactly knew how to get it so I test tried a couple of things until I came out with that final solution.

regards

Seb

[Seb]

Ignore my post! I like to post first, and read responses later, so my first reaction isn't tinged by other opinions.

I do like the second version better.

Thanks for commenting Megan!

Seb

[payn817]

The second version is wonderful, the feel of isolation and the dramatic sky are excellent!