Home · Register · Join Upload & Sell

Moderated by: Fred Miranda
Username  

  New fredmiranda.com Mobile Site
  New Feature: SMS Notification alert
  New Feature: Buy & Sell Watchlist
  

FM Forums | Photo Critique | Join Upload & Sell

  

Archive 2013 · City Sunset

  
 
lvanzijl
Offline

Upload & Sell: Off
p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · City Sunset


I took a photo 2 minutes from my home and worked on it for about 2 hours and was totally happy with it. 500px people where pretty enthousiastic too but I am looking to learn so enough of the positive I am ready for the negative.

What would you have done differently?

http://pcdn.500px.net/45089070/2cd56e1516eb1249f43723c6c203fd0d42be76fb/2048.jpg




Sep 04, 2013 at 07:15 AM
sbeme
Offline
• • • • • • •
Upload & Sell: On
p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · City Sunset


Beautiful work.
Great color, detail. Excellent job on the exposure. Is this a blend or subtle HDR?
Verticals look well-controlled.
No nits for me to pick.
Scott



Sep 04, 2013 at 07:22 AM
lvanzijl
Offline

Upload & Sell: Off
p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · City Sunset


Ah a little background might be usefull yes

The idea was to use multiple exposures of -2 0 and +2 but I only used the middle one. There was a pola filter on my lens just for a simple ND effect because I forgot my 2 stops ND and 9 stops seemed way too much effort for the small time frame I had.

Did most things in Lightroom but booted up photoshop just for small details (which in the end made a huge difference ):

- Brushed away some lightning poles on the right (there was too much chaos around the red building on the right)
- Brushed away some trash in the crash.
- Played around with the color of the grass (but didnt really know what I was doing)
- Some dodging and burning on the gras and buildings to make the lighting a little bit more interesting


tldr; 1 exposure + pola filter



Sep 04, 2013 at 07:33 AM
RustyBug
Offline
• • • • • • •
Upload & Sell: On
p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · City Sunset


Some very nice work on many levels.

Some micro-nits that you might want to look at:

Sharpening halos on building

Sky color between building on right doesn't seem to follow natural falloff transition from center (sun) to edge

Small center waterfront buildings are illuminated by . In nature, they are illuminated by the open sky (same as taller buildings), but you seem to have them brighter tonally and of a different color balance. The brighter tones and warmer whites draw our eye there nicely (diggin the use of both tone & WB/hue to draw the eye) compared to the darker tonal values and cooler whites elsewhere in the image, but it is a mismatch (creates the draw, but tells on itself, i.e. double edged sword).

Check the four story building behind the red waterfront building. Note the tonal value gradient and hue gradient that is on the faces of that building ... where is that color/tone shift coming from ... brushwork from the smaller buildings

The middle reflection area in the water seems to have a WB/color shift that doesn't match a corresponding color shift in the sky from which it would be reflecting. (Polarizer influence )

To my eye, portions of the image are illuminated by a "second sun" in the sky (out of view), while others are only illuminated by the open sky. Granted some will think that this is too small even for a micro-nit as the image is nice and does compel us to look where you have drawn us to look ... very nice job of that, btw.

As such, recognizing the level of workmanship you put forth to do that, these are some of the things I see as "tells" on your work. This isn't meant to knock the work or image, but only for you to asses where you might reduce your tells even further. The general public ... they'll never see these and rarely consider the "light source" and lighting angles as to whether or not it is even feasible or not. As a craftsman however, when we pick up the brush and start altering our lighting ... we should. Of course, its all fair game for artistic rendering, so I'll say again that these are some extreme micro-nits that will likely go unnoticed by the masses, but they caught my attention, so I offer them for your review (which is the one that matters).

HTH ... looking forward to seeing more good stuff and yes, this is good stuff.



Sep 04, 2013 at 08:59 AM
lvanzijl
Offline

Upload & Sell: Off
p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · City Sunset


RustyBug wrote:
Some very nice work on many levels.

Some micro-nits that you might want to look at:

Sharpening halos on building

Sky color between building on right doesn't seem to follow natural falloff transition from center (sun) to edge

Small center waterfront buildings are illuminated by . In nature, they are illuminated by the open sky (same as taller buildings), but you seem to have them brighter tonally and of a different color balance. The brighter tones and warmer whites draw our eye there nicely (diggin the use of both tone & WB/hue to draw the eye) compared to the darker tonal values and cooler
...Show more

First of all, I laughed out loud reading your comments, amazing that you could point out a lot of my 'subtle' adjustments I actually spoke to a friend about needing a second sun for these kind of pictures .

- I noticed the halos but didnt know where they were coming from, will look into the sharpening I did.
- I added some warmth with a whitebalance brush on the buildings directly below the sun to make the contrast between the sun and buildings a bit more subtle.
- The water reflection thing might come from a ND gradiant that I added on the sky in lightroom, is this possible? since I didn't do anything to the water itself. For the future, should I brush the same adjustments on the reflection or something like half of the adjustments? This isn't the first time I forgot about the water reflections. (see picture below)
- The skycolor falloff is totally natural, did nothing to that .



http://pcdn.500px.net/34332424/7d3b000406b9bb35f355aa47a36779b68eee1ed8/1080.jpg

This watchtower picture was my practice shot for using healing brush tools, I removed loads of stuff but forgot the reflection of the lampposts in the water

Thanks a lot for your comments, it might be tiny nitpicks now, but if nobody would point me too them they might become bigger when I keep using the same strategies



Sep 05, 2013 at 02:55 AM





FM Forums | Photo Critique | Join Upload & Sell

    
 

You are not logged in. Login or Register

Username       Or Reset password



This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.