Final Edit of Dunes

I posted this in the Critique forum a week or two ago...

The first is a normal exposure. The second is a five-image HDR of the scene. The last is a creative experiment.

I just submitted the edit to a contest, but am curious what else the post-processing gurus here would have done?

G

looks good! I like the addition of the stars.

It's just sweet, GB

I like the stars.....but not the moon. It's wrong for the lighting of the dunes. the dunes on the left have the highlighting in the foreground and the shadows in the background. The highlighting on the smooth parts of the dunes also indicate that the light source is far to the left of the image.

The composition is wonderful, and I admit that that's great placement for an element- just not the element that should be the only obvious source of lighting in a night scene.

- Joe U.

The b/w has the most 'impact'. I too would lose the moon and also darken the sky more towards the horizon. There is more gradient to the sky than normally is going to occur without clouds.

The second image has too much yellow or orange in the coloration. Needs a different variation in color for my taste.

One other item to consider is slightly cropping along the right or along the top to force the leading lines of the dunes and windrows to lead the eye further into and through the photograph.

Thanks fellows. There was a lot of decision-making to do when it came to adding elements. I totally see that the dunes could not be lit as they are with the moon where it is (unless there's another light source behind the photographer :) ). But experimenting I found that since the lines 'led' the viewer to that spot in the sky, something had to be there.. I couldn't find anything with the same stature of the moon to take its place (I was thinking a Nativity scene, but it's the wrong time of the year for that ..). In the end it's a fantasy creation, which may somewhat excuse the technical inaccuracy ...

Drg, I really played around with the cropping (in a very non-scientific manner), and just ended up w/ this ... I can now see why artists, writers, etc are so inconsistent. They probably don't know how they arrived where they did more than half the time :8:

Post processing steps BTW ...

- Converted to black and white, additionally darkening the Blues and Cyans using Corel Photo-Paint's 'grayscale' tool
- bumped up contrast
- darkened overly bright dune areas as needed
- copied and pasted moon from another photo taken minutes beforehand. Darkened it and made it smaller
- hand added the stars. Made top ones larger than the low distant ones (which seems to be the case in real life). Made ones near the moon darker than than the edge ones, as this is the way we would see them
- masked the sky, excluding the moon, and applied a smart blur to remove visible gradienting

Middle image with the most contrast does it for me, would look epic on a living room wall.