gdanmitchell Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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If it were mine, I might consider a bit of a crop on the left. The snow covered slope to the left of El Cap in your crop is on an edge and just about the brightest thing in the composition, thus it tend to distract me from what I think are the more important elements of your scene, all of which lie to the right. Also, this slope is the highest thing on the left side, higher than El Cap. My crop would ensure that it isn't.
As you to your two versions, my preference is to tend toward lightening things up for a print, since prints can seem darker than screen images. However, I feel like the second version goes a bit too far perhaps, especially on the Valley floor, which seems ab it unnaturally bright for me and on Sentinel Rocks above Bridal Veil Fall, where the snow gets so bright that it loses detail. It seems like perhaps you just brightened the whole thing? If so, you might consider using masks or the equivalent to bring up some of the areas that are most important and leave some of the darker areas as is.
To my eye, the brighter version also reveals some color casts, especially in the Valley where the fog is — it seems too "warm" in color and has unnatural green and yellow tonality. Again, perhaps the global adjustment is getting you into trouble and localizing the adjustments might help. In Photoshop, I might use a curve layer to selectively lighten portions of the fog, but not the non-fog areas, and I would perhaps set the curve to "luminosity" rather than "normal" to avoid some of the color shifts. I would also allow the shadow areas to remain a bit blue rather than trying to push them toward non-shade tonality.
Good luck,
Dan
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