My boring road

[Weird Girl]

This is my first attempt at a good before and after- taking something pretty boring and spicing it up Anyway, all of the editing was done in Lightroom but I just got PS4 so any advice for Photoshop would be great too! Can you tell I "removed" the signs? How do you feel about the saturation- I usually don't like a lot of it so maybe I am just used to looking at this picture.

First one is the after

Camera: Nikon D5000
Lens: 70-300mm
Shutter Speed: 1/500 (very bright day)
Aperture: f7.1
Focal Length: 85mm
ISO: 250
flash did not fire

[funkygeezer]

Well I am by no means any good with either photography or Photoshop I would say average with both at most. The closest sign is hidden well, however the 2nd sign not so well. I am sure I can see you edit there. The colour and saturation looks much better in the after shot.

[Weird Girl]

Oh, you are right! Did not see that- how about the new attachment?

[Weird Girl]

I think I like this one better for the bottom post area of the second sign... thoughts?

[Weird Girl]

I know it's not the most exciting photo to look at but any comments would be great!

[BigFuzzy]

Not sure I would have seen the edits had I not been looking for them, so that's good.

I think your colors are a too saturated. Did you use saturation or vibrance on LR? I find that using vibrance (judiciously) is much better than Saturation. Give it a shot if you hadn't already. The color saturation, to me, is particularly noticeable where the cables are in the bottom left of the frame.. they seem unnaturally blue to me (could be my monitor though, not at home!)

Also, due to all the processing (or high ISO) there is a lot of noise/digital artifacts in the sky.. very noticeable to me.

In the end, the image as a whole is improved with the editing and I think will be better with toning down the obvious saturation. Also, the scene in and of itself just doesn't draw me in.

The road is a nice diagonal line in the image, but that's just about it for me. It just feels like you were standing on the side of the road and *snap*..
Change the perspective.. get lower to the ground to create some interesting foreground.. anything to change the feeling of you pulling the same ol' "I'm standing here with my camera at eye level thing"..

To me, that's one of the major mistakes most non-pros (myself included!) make, and that's to NOT play with the perspective. Oftentimes just a small skewing of the angle of view away from how we, as humans standing there, always sees things is all it takes to separate your images from the 6 billion other ones that are similar.

[Weird Girl]

Thank you for your comments! You are correct that it was just a snap shot- I literally took it just to play with removing things I don't want in a photo- but I did like the lines. I did use saturation but think I saw you say something about vibrance in another post which made me try it on some other photos and I agree with you. This photo in particular was oversaturated somewhat on purpose because at the time I just thought it made that red tree look neat, the sky blue (but i do see the artifacts), and gave it a different look/feel since yes, the subject matter is pretty boring. Anyway, I think my biggest problem right now is colours in general and im not sure if it's my laptop or what but my eye just isn't trained enough for natural skin tones and such yet- they always seem to be on the more red side and then when i play with lights/darks/shadows they get this grey hue on their faces making them look dirty LOL. Maybe I just over edit in general? I use Lightroom but just got Photoshop 4 and need to learn it!

I do admit that I haven't experimented much with different angles and it seems to keep slipping my mind when I go to shoot... I am definitely going to make an effort to start playing with that! Thanks again for your time!

[kaloyanpaunov]

Originally Posted by BigFuzzy

Not sure I would have seen the edits had I not been looking for them, so that's good.

I think your colors are a too saturated. Did you use saturation or vibrance on LR? I find that using vibrance (judiciously) is much better than Saturation. Give it a shot if you hadn't already. The color saturation, to me, is particularly noticeable where the cables are in the bottom left of the frame.. they seem unnaturally blue to me (could be my monitor though, not at home!)

Also, due to all the processing (or high ISO) there is a lot of noise/digital artifacts in the sky.. very noticeable to me.

In the end, the image as a whole is improved with the editing and I think will be better with toning down the obvious saturation. Also, the scene in and of itself just doesn't draw me in.

The road is a nice diagonal line in the image, but that's just about it for me. It just feels like you were standing on the side of the road and *snap*..
Change the perspective.. get lower to the ground to create some interesting foreground.. anything to change the feeling of you pulling the same ol' "I'm standing here with my camera at eye level thing"..

To me, that's one of the major mistakes most non-pros (myself included!) make, and that's to NOT play with the perspective. Oftentimes just a small skewing of the angle of view away from how we, as humans standing there, always sees things is all it takes to separate your images from the 6 billion other ones that are similar.

agree for the saturation i also like colourful photos but i think it is just a bit too much