Comments on my first attempt at a landscape

[neilwood]

Feel free to browse (and comment on) the rest of them as well. They were all take on the same evening.

The file size has been cut dramatically when uploading from 3mb

Nice, I like the shadows.
I think this photo would also look nice b & w.

[ELAY]

Skyline is a nice subject, and you got great sidelight on the faces of the building. Gives nice colours and contrasts on the terrestrial parts of the photo. You got some good clouds (the more landscapes I take, the more I think they should be called cloudscapes), though there are so few of them, and they look so benign, you will have trouble persuading anybody that this was taken in Edinburgh.

Good choice -- I think this is one of the best if not the best of the bunch up on Flickr (though I think the bridge in 105 has potential if you got closer).

How are you with layers in post-processing? You solved the dark dirt/bright sky problem by having the sky a little bit overexposed and the land a bit under. I would like to see you work on land and sky layers separately (lightening the one and darkening the other) and then combine then with a mask.

Also consider investing in a circular polarizer -- it will instantly improve your skies, especially when you are perpendicular to the sun like in this shot.

EL

EL

[neilwood]

that one was straight of the camera - no post processing at all.

I am considering a polariser though - but i might need to wait a wee while until my bank balance recovers from the camera purchase.

i did do a bit of processing on some of the images - the ones with the "a" suffix.Just did some tweaking with curves mainly.

[ELAY]

Sorry, wasn't suggesting that you had done post on this shot.

My reference to your solving the dark/light problem was to your in-camera solution -- I meant to suggest that if you felt like diving into post, you could try working up the sky and land differentially and then combining them.

EL

[GaryMoffat]

Only one obsevation - Its not raining

Nice pictures Neil. Edinburgh captured very nicley.

I also enjoyed the others posted on Flickr.

Gary.

[pcarfan]

I was working with the image with curves to darken and give more contrast to the sky (it can be made much more vivid but I settled on this for a change). The blue yellow shift is interesting and can be tweaked to various levels, but could not lighten the land without ruining the original colors. Finally did the curves in the LAB mode to the Luminance channel and it brightened it without much change to the color. I am posting it as this is the first image that made a difference by working in LAB luminance channel. I did not use any masking, only curves (RGB curves for the sky and LAB curves for the land) and saturation (lightroom).

[windrider86]

wow what a difference

[wulf]

That is a very effective bit of post-processing, pcarfan - like holding up a giant golden reflector just out of the frame

You have managed to reduce the contrast and warm the colours without it looking artificial and the result lets the original picture shine.

Wulf

[ELAY]

Agreed. Nice work.