Tetons, Schwabacher Landing

[Gavin Slabbert]

Went to shoot the reflections and the sunrise and all I got was rain and broken rain clouds ... still I cant complain

[Don Railton]

Hi Gavin.

I think you got a little more than rain and broken clouds.... This is an almost perfect reflection in a very nice composed image of a beautiful scene. Well done! My only gripe is that there is a little green 'fog' just above the tree line which looks like a processing artefact and maybe the mountains could do with a touch more sharpening..

Thanks for showing

DON

[dankearl]

You did not state your settings or your PP.
It appears to be heavy HDR.
To be honest the PP looks pretty rough, as Don stated the mountains are not sharp and to me the reflection looks photoshopped or something.
Why are the clouds almost black in the reflection? They really need to be lightened in my opinion to match the real clouds.
The reflection should also not be sharper than the real thing, not sure why you sharpened one and not the other?
I also think a more traditional crop with some off the bottom would look better for me, cropped to just about your signature.

[Gavin Slabbert]

Dankearl thank you for your comment, however you are so far off the mark that it is not funny. This is not an hdr, the reflection is as it was seen and the mountains are as they were presented to me. There are no artifacts in the uncompressed jpg image or psd, and that has got to be due to some weird compression and conversion to an srgb web image. As for sharpening the entire image was only lightly sharpened and no selective sharpening wax done.

I guess that you are entitled to your opinion and thank you for your critique.

[dankearl]

Gavin,
Sorry if you did not like my critique, I hope you don't take it personally, not my intention.
Since you didn't give your settings or camera info (and still did not), I made my best guess that it was HDR.
Since it was not, then it was way too heavily processed for my tastes (sorry).
Too much contrast, the mountains are not sharp, and I still don't get how if the scene was as captured,
the clouds are so dark in the reflection.
Just my opinion, sorry you took it the wrong way.

[Morkel Erasmus]

A lovely scene, Gavin. As Dan mentioned, giving the EXIF settings in the original thread helps us find a good base from where to build the critique.
I appreciate that you said it was not processed as an HDR, though to me it also has that semi-grunge HDR look. It could have been achieved through other PP workflow steps in normal Photoshop as well. I agree the reflection needs to have the same "luminosity" as the sky it's reflecting. The mountains look like they suffered from too much selective shadow/highlight adjustment. Would you perhaps post an unprocessed JPG taken straight from the RAW (removing Lightroom RAW steps as well) and post it here, just for comparison?

[Gavin Slabbert]

Dan actually I did not, though when I read the critique initially I went what are you talking about, especially since the images was very well received on 500px.com. Also responding on an android leaves little room for a full response so I will do my best to fill in the entire specs.
The exif on the image is as follows ...

Camera: 1D MK IV
Lens: Canon 16 - 35 II F/2.8
Focal Length: 18 mm
TV 1/60
AV f/16
ISO 100
Tripod was used
The sky was darkened using a 4x6 2 stop graduated ND

Ok now to the intent, typically I do not like shooting images with any main line through the center of the image but in this case cropping out the grass in the lower right unbalanced the image and gave the reflection a sort of empty feeling and that the images balance from right corner to left upper felt off.

The clouds, were not quite as dark as they appear in the image but that was due to the graduated ND, and I agree that I should have dodged them a bit to lighten the image and thought about it for a bit and then decided that the dark and ominous feel of them gave the image somewhat of a sinister feeling, besides I would then have to work on the reflection in the water and I was not going to mess with that.
Other playing around with the WB and a light amount of sharpening using dslr fractal sharpening action (light sharpen / low iso option) nothing else was done to this image.

I guess now that I have read your and other reviews on the sharpness of the mountain range, I should have selectively sharpened it, but really targeted this image for print on a 30 x 40 canvas which now sits in my living room.
After the artifacting around the trees was mentioned, I took a long hard look and compared the cr2 file, the dng file, the psd file the jpg file and the canvas on the wall the only time I see it is once the image has been saved to web format and compressed to a sub 300kb file and the conversion to srgb, so something is going on there. ( I happen to have the dng and cr2 version of this file as I am in the process of converting all my cr2 images to dng for space reasons)

As for my workflow, I open my images in Canons DPP, then use Arash's recommended settings with a few very minor tweaks, then go into ACR and correct the WB, work on any clipping using the whites and blacks and holding down the alt key so that I can see how much clipping there is (if any) and do that to set the white and black points in the image. I do not do anything else in ACR and do the balance of my work in CS6.

As I said, little was done to this image as I liked it the way it was originally shot and it resembles the scene as I saw it when I shot it a few weeks ago.

Again thanks for your opinion and time put into reviewing the image and please do not feel that you cannot rip my images apart as you are entitled to your opinion and even though I may vehemently disagree with what you have to say at times, it still serves purpose to get someone elses opinion, and frankly I would prefer to get into discussion and maybe heated discussion over an in image, than having to deal with oh "Nice Shot" as that serves no purpose other than ego stroking.

If there is anything else you would like to know and have more Idea and or would like to get further into this discussion then please feel free to do so.

Thanks again

Gavin

[Gavin Slabbert]

A lovely scene, Gavin. As Dan mentioned, giving the EXIF settings in the original thread helps us find a good base from where to build the critique.
I appreciate that you said it was not processed as an HDR, though to me it also has that semi-grunge HDR look. It could have been achieved through other PP workflow steps in normal Photoshop as well. I agree the reflection needs to have the same "luminosity" as the sky it's reflecting. The mountains look like they suffered from too much selective shadow/highlight adjustment. Would you perhaps post an unprocessed JPG taken straight from the RAW (removing Lightroom RAW steps as well) and post it here, just for comparison?

Morkel I was busy writing a detailed response when your post came through, take a look at that.

[Gavin Slabbert]

Ok found the reason why the clouds are so dark in the reflection, I used a graduated filter in PP to balance it out, did not like like and thought that I deleted it, but did not.

Good catch guys thank you.

Seems that the issue was somewhere between the seat and the keyboard :)

[Andrew McLachlan]

Hi Gavin, I agree with the above comments and as Morkel suggests it would be nice to see the original RAW file for comparison. For me a like to see reflections just a tad darker but that's just me.

[Morkel Erasmus]

Thanks for your thoughts, Gavin.
It would still be nice to see the original untouched RAW converted to JPG. I'd even have a play with it if you are keen.
It is a nice scene and composition, like I said. It just has a certain "grunge" look that I normally associate with automated HDRs. Having started out years ago by doing mostly automated grungy HDRs I now rather detest them :e3. Not that I detest your image, but just wanted to show you my train of thought.

As an aside - the gauge of what's popular on 500px these days is also a bit appalling to me. Again, no bearing on your photo, but I find that 500px has become a bit of a circus with oversaturated overprocessed composites and often generic captive animal shots appearing on the front page because those users have amassed a huge following of people who have a tit-for-tat commenting/voting attitude. :w3