This is a ho him image, but I thought it would be a good one to work on for post processing. I would like to get your processing on the SOOC and teach us all some stuff.
It occurs to me we could learn how to post process, but also how we want the final image to look,
Ben, you're re-work is similar to what I envision for the image. I prefer to keep the foreground lighter in color, personal preference, and I tried to add some additional detail to the water which I think helps the image overall.
Those darn reeds. I have been searching for a place to get to waters edge along this lake. I found one place about 15 miles south of here but the north end is hard to even approach and when you do it is full of reeds. So I Incorporated them.
Your tone on the reeds is probably more accurate than mine. I wanted to keep the mountain white to emphasis the snow, just as you did.
Not so much a noticeable shift in the color balance, just keeping the whites close to neutral prior to pushing things as a preventive measure so as not to amplify an otherwise indiscernible cast.
The photo filter was just a light overlay of the blue (chosen from the sky) to help smooth out some banding that occurred from pushing the lower layers. I went back and made the sky a bit smoother in the BG copy layer to address the banding as the photo layer was of nominal assistance to smooth the transitions.
Thanks Karen, another high contrast version plus a B&W. I tried a B&W yesterday (different image) but I had no clue on how to get such dark sky's. Well I could mask and darken, but I was looking for a color change that makes blue black.
The high contrast is interesting. Oregon Gal is the only one who left it about the same as mine. This makes me ask if I have a tendency to produce images too low in contrast for the taste here?
Or is it simply a way to get drama where natural drama is missing?
It's easy to darken a blue sky when converting to B & W. I used the color sliders (blue &cyan) dragged back in Silver Efex Pro, but you can do a similar thing with a B & W layer in photoshop:
Yep, I like Oregon Gals version best, perhaps a bit less blue on the water and a bit darker on the sky. But I certainly prefer the whiter mountains which they were.
Rippling water does not take sharpening well. It stops looking like water and starts looking like blue sand or gravel. I almost always mask it from sharpening and sometimes even smooth it some.
I was a Kodachrome 25 user. When I used 64 I set it at 100. But I usually used 25. I tried Fuji 50 a few times but that was near the end of my film days. I quit because of inability to manual focus.
But I was an f32 guy because of something I had read about DOF, and was using cheap lenses to boot. Maybe some of the softness was diffraction. These days I usually work at f8 and use good lenses.
It could be that I got used to soft images? These days I do minimum sharpening, just enough to correct the &^%%$ AA filter.
