Last March I had a great time shooting next to Ben for a couple of days at Capitol Reef. He obviously loves those copper colored rock faces and his images reflect those feelings. Here is one of my attempts. It was a beautiful area but somehow my image seems to fall considerably short of the reality or at least my memory of that place. Any suggests and comments are appreciated.

Hi Jim, this is exactly the way I recall it. My only nit is that the mountain seems to be falling over. No doubt caused by an upward tilted camera.

Ben, thanks. I kept trying to decide what looked off. I thought maybe it was the level of the horizon but now I see the lens induced distortion. I am going to do some shooting this afternoon but I will try to fix this and repost later in the afternoon.

That sort of distortion is very hard to fix. I just returned a Zeiss 15 f2.8, because it always needed to be pointed up for landscapes. This is where a TSE lens saves the day. I always try to get my camera leveled and only point upwards if all else fails and then only by the minimum amount.

For a conventional lens, I would probably level it first in vertical and do a pano then crop.

Definitely need some CCW rotation:

looks good, I took a stab at it, but I ended up loosing too much. Did you stretch part of it?

I used context aware fill to rebuild the corners to simulate what it might have looked like if the camera had been leveled.

My attempt without correction for missing corners.

I went back an looked at numerous images I have of this area taken from different places. It seems clear to me that the cracks on the rock face should in fact be leaning. Not that reality makes any difference. There does not seem to be anything that looks remotelty horizontal or vertical. I did a quick fix and then I decided the color also appeared too intense. I cut back on the saturation but now I can't decide which appears more realistic

I really liked the colors of the first image you posted - your last one has lost some of its appeal to me. However we don't have those kinds of landscapes around were I live, so I have no pre-formed ideas of how it should look "in person", and this might be one of the reasons I'm drawn to the saturated reds of the first image. Just my $0.02

I was there with Jim, but my images of this place were from a cloudy day. I have some on a brighter day that look a lot like Jim's original. These copper rocks can really glow. I think his first was believable. This is why I come to these places to see those great slabs of colorful rock.

My wife and daughter see my prints of such and say, its just a rock:-(

I agree with Jim that the top rock structure did not have any straight verticals, but some of that fluted red mud rock did. Since I tend to take these sorts of shots like a surveyor with a perfectly level camera and a lens with near zero distortion, I trust that was how it was.

I would agree - having lived in AZ and traveled a bunch in Utah, the original image colors are quite believable.