Foggy Maine Morning

[superspam]

Hey, relatively new here. Here's a photo I took last week in Sedgewick Maine. It's a photo that I took with virtually no thought but it ended up being one of my favorites that I took on the trip for whatever reason. Anyway, I'm trying to get my PP skills up to snuff and so I figured this would be a good place to get suggestions.

Here's the first photo



Here's my PP photo


-8 brightness
+10 contrast
-20 saturation
Dodged the foreground


Obviously I have a lot to learn. I think my first PP attempt left the foreground too busy. I want to make the picture darker but I don't want the foreground to end up looking washed out because of it.

So to you more experienced PPers out there, what would you have done?

[candleman]

i'm assuming you've used picassa.. i havn't used it so dont know what its capable of.

just a suggestion. it looks like the horizon is not straight.. as are a few others in your album.
straighten it out and it will appear better.

what might help bring out a horizon is burn the mid tones/shadows on the horizon..

if you can.. use a low opacity screening brush over the sky with a grey (or other colour.. pink could even look cool) to bring a distinction between sky and sea.

or even a saturating sponge over the sea OR sky .. that way you can bring one or the other out a bit.

??
thats what i'd try, but it depends what you're looking for

[superspam]

Thanks for the tips! What's a screening brush?

[stefanie_s]

A screening brush is a brush that is set to screen mode instead of normal mode. Here's a quick edit I did, hope you like it. It took about five minutes or so, I didn't really spend much time, just wanted to give you some options.

http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/d.../DSC_0217a.jpg
(I guess we're not supposed to post the changes we made? still new here sorry)
So what I did here was to level the horizon (always always level your horizons! ) (edit: oops I used levels and edited them first) then I made a neutral gray overlay layer and lightened the shorelines by painting over the gray with white at about 5% opacity. Then I darkened the horizon slightly by painting with black. I've found that method works much better then using the burn and dodge tools. But that's just me.

Next I made a new layer and using a dark cobalt blue I went over the water at a low opacity using screen mode, and then used a dark pink and went over the lower sky using overlay mode.

I combined all the layers into one, resized, duplicated the layer, used high pass filter set to about .5 for this size image and set the mode to overlay ( a great sharpening technique to play with) and that's it.

Anyway, that's just one possible outcome. Playing around with it a little more could yield any number of variations.