The horizon is at 50% (which is generally not recommended), the sky is flat, it appears to be tilted and you cut the very edge of the building off.
Given the flat sky and 50% I would crop off the top a lot or try to recover it in photoshop. The problem is that then you would slice through building so fixing the sky is the best idea.
I would fix the perceived tilt by making the middle of track look level in both directions (move the right side down).
If reshooting, less sky and get the whole building.
On the positive side the colors are good, the exposure is good (if you shot in raw you should be able to recover the sky in photoshop) and the depth is great.
Scott Stoness wrote:
The horizon is at 50% (which is generally not recommended), the sky is flat, it appears to be tilted and you cut the very edge of the building off.
Given the flat sky and 50% I would crop off the top a lot or try to recover it in photoshop. The problem is that then you would slice through building so fixing the sky is the best idea.
I would fix the perceived tilt by making the middle of track look level in both directions (move the right side down).
If reshooting, less sky and get the whole building.
On the positive side the colors are good, the exposure is good (if you shot in raw you should be able to recover the sky in photoshop) and the depth is great....Show more →
Thank you for looking and the comments - I have Capture Nx and Photoshop Elements 6 will elements dothe trick?
I am a canon person so I don't know about Capture Nx - I presume it is your camera download software.
But elements will do everything you need.
Open Image/Rotate/Custom and put in 3degrees right to untilt
Open Enhance/Shadows&Highlights and slide lithten shadows to left and darken highlights to right
Click on left square tool and then drag the size to where you want it and then open image / crop
I would normally open levels and fix white balance by clicking on middle eye dropper and a grey area first and then
fixing the dragging the triangles close so that they are snug against the histogram before doing all this but the picture is pretty well exposed.
Re CNX - use the crop tool to rotate and straighten the horizon. Create a new edit step and use the selection brush to paint the sky - then from the drop down select colors - curves and adjust the curve to darken the selected area. Alternatively you can choose the color picker - advanced and try a variation of the sky color spectrum. Or, you can try color control points as an alternative. Nikon has a tutorial that specifically addresses this topic...Google for NX tutorials...it's on Nikon's site. You can also search the Post-Processing & Printing Forum for capture NX and get other helpful links.
My experience is that Capture NX does a far better job of rendering NEF (Nikon's RAW format) images than CS3 or Lightroom - you do pay a price in speed depending on your computer.
I took the liberty of using CNX to play with your original post, if you object let me know and I'll remove it.
Basically I selectively applied Levels & Curves to several areas, a gradient to darken the bottom edge (track), changed the overall color balance to remove a cyan cast, and rotated so the light standard is vertical. Working with the NEF would permit better pp'ing since jpg alterations are mostly 'lossy' processes and we can't really recover a whole lot of the sky as is possible with RAW unless really blown out.
Bob Jarman wrote:
I took the liberty of using CNX to play with your original post, if you object let me know and I'll remove it.
Basically I selectively applied Levels & Curves to several areas, a gradient to darken the bottom edge (track), changed the overall color balance to remove a cyan cast, and rotated so the light standard is vertical. Working with the NEF would permit better pp'ing since jpg alterations are mostly 'lossy' processes and we can't really recover a whole lot of the sky as is possible with RAW unless really blown out.
