Lovely scene. trees and slope of hillsides on either side frame and hold the eye nicely.
All my opinion:
On the non-calibrated monitor the clouds and sky look a little overworked.
There appears to be haloing along ridge line.
The most distant mountains are sharper than the Aspen grove, perhaps that should be the reverse since the Aspens are the subject.
Overall, you might try warming the image a bit, again this monitor, has a pronounced cyan cast to the mountains, sky, and clouds. (But then regular readers know my color perception sucks.)
I'm jealous too Rusty. Anyway, my only beef is the overly dark tree line. Opened up some of those details and did selective warming (kept the sky; didn't want to deal with any introduced noise issues there).
Really nice shot. Here is the direction I would go (just personal preferences):
- less green/cyan in the sky
- a lot less blue/magenta in the mountains
- a little more shadow details in the evergreens
- brighten the bare foreground a bit
Uber Goober wrote:
I like what Peano2 did, but the telephone poles really bug me... A minutes' work could have them gone, though.
Yea, I kept debating if it bothered me or not... Normally I remove things like that, but knowing the highway was right below the crop, it made sense to leave them. Then again, as a landscape shot, why wouldn't I remove them...
Here's my edits based on feedback (done using layers on the full size 16bit file):
I could probably still darken the mountain in the background a bit, but I didn't want it "too" warm overall. I did green-up some of the trees in shadow along the base of the mountain also.
I really like this shot and didnt find much needed fixing to improve it. Then again I may have totally butchered this image for all i know (This is my first time working on someone elses work). I dont think i did anything that hasnt already been done but figured i'd give it a try.
I took out the cyan cast
I softened the sky (maybe a bit too much)
I added a little tonal contrast to the clouds
I added a bit of warmth
I resized and sharpened it down to 1024 (i hope picasa does a good job retaining the detail)
I DIDNT touch the curves or levels (didnt have to)
