How do you make an ugly Desert look good

[rlarsen]

[rlarsen]

[rlarsen]

[rlarsen]

[rlarsen]

[Dazyl]

Ugly? Ohmygoodnessno.... these are all lovely shots! I've never been here, but it's clearly a gorgeous vista.

I downloaded and played with all of them, and bar none, they improved radically by tightening the RGB levels down and/or up a bit (tightening toward the histogram exposures) and especially by increasing the contrast by about 10.

I took the liberty of tweaking and uploading your first shot -- Desertland5 -- in which I also slightly upped the red level.



Is this what you had in mind / saw?

At least two of the vistas have perhaps more foreground than you need, and if you were looking more for cropping ideas, then please accept my apology for having "played" with your photo. I really like these, though.

[Nai no Kami]

For some reason my reply did not show up. What's more funny is that -with other words- I said more or less what my above poster did. And not only that, out postprocessing is similar too (now that I see it, I think it's excessively saturated). Another thing I also said and I would like to make clear is that any postprocessing done by me will lack the utmost important information: I did not take the picture, I was not there and hence I will be unable to convey the emotions and feelings that moved you to take your photo. I strongly believe that post processing should aid you to express yourself better: making a photo "prettier" is not as important.

Nevertheless, here is my (incomplete and poor) attempt.

[xxpinballxx]

they are great shots......A desert is always gonna be a desert and theres its beauty. I thought maybe a cropped B&W might look good. Here is what I came up with I adjusted the contrast and brightness then went greyscale. plus i rotated it a bit to make it horizontal. The horizon was a bit off .

[rlarsen]

......A desert is always gonna be a desert and theres its beauty.


Thanks for the advice. Dazy and Nai no Kami I like the color changes you made. xxpinballxx, I do like the B&W. I will look at the Desert differently now. Thanks

[Farkled]

Very Nice Shots!

The desert is the desert. It isn't ugly, any more than a green forest or a white glacier. It's up to you to convey it's beauty, majesty, and sheer awesomeness - and therein lies the challenge