Windmill at sunset

[PhoebeG]

Comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Is the foreground too soft (wind was blowing a bit)?

PG

[Wings]

Strange that nobody commented yet, since this actually quite a good shot.
The composition is good and the object and colors are well balanced.
It does lack some saturation and pure blacks. Why do I say pure blacks? Well, the main objects are silhouttes and in my opinion a silhouette has a stronger impact with deeper blacks. The added stauration creates a nice blance between upper and lower part of the image and gives the sky slightly more weight.
I show you what I mean by posting a touched up Photoshop version (I also removed some noise).

A good shot that only needs a few minor adjustments. Well done Phoebe!

[PhoebeG]

Strange that nobody commented yet, since this actually quite a good shot.
The composition is good and the object and colors are well balanced.
It does lack some saturation and pure blacks. Why do I say pure blacks? Well, the main objects are silhouttes and in my opinion a silhouette has a stronger impact with deeper blacks. The added stauration creates a nice blance between upper and lower part of the image and gives the sky slightly more weight.
I show you what I mean by posting a touched up Photoshop version (I also removed some noise).

A good shot that only needs a few minor adjustments. Well done Phoebe!

Thanks for punching this up. Looks much better.

PG

[Ultra Magnus]

How could you increase saturation w/o photoshop? Saturation makes the colors fuller, correct? (I'm a nebie!!) Thanks.

[SmartWombat]

Like setting up my home darkroom when I used film, I think getting image adjusting software is similar for digital photography.

You may be able to adjust saturation in the camera, but only before you take the photograph. It'll probably be called saturation or colour on the menu. Normally you don't have much control over it though.
On my Minolta for example adjusting it from -3 thru 0 to +3 means - what?
I have no idea what my camera does and I'm not inclined to play with it to find out - yes I'm lazy

To get what you want, you would need to try taking the same photo with all the settings. See what the effect of the settings is, and then remember that next time you want to take a picture with a particular effect.

OR if you don't change it in the camera, but do it afterwards, then you need a program to edit the image in a computer. There are many programs (at widely varying prices) that you can use to alter the colour in your photos. You may have one that came with your camera.

I found the Dimage Viewer program that came with my camera is painfully slow in operation. But I am running it on a 6 month old laptop, that seems to be an age in terms of price/performance!
I use ThumbsPlus as a basic editor as well as an indexing and thumbnail program.
A friend of mine swears by PaintShop Pro, our graphic artist at work loves PhotoShop.

[Ultra Magnus]

Thanks.. My camera has +/0/-.. Not a real big difference. I was wondering if you could accomplish it with shutter speed or aperature settings or something.

Hypothetically, what would setting the shutter speed and apereature to a setting that would normally overexpose a picture but do a -someting EV?

[darkrainfall]

It took me some time to comment, but this is a good pic, though I think, imo, that a slightly faster shutter speed would have kept the windmill blades sharper... either that or a slower shutter speed would have made them have a bit more action. Anyway, that's just a nitpik, the photo is good and I especially like Wings' photoshopping.