Coastal Dunes Late Afternoon

[Julie Brown]

December 2009: freshwater lake (with gators) at Topsail Preserve State Park, on the Emerald Coast, Florida

Canon 40D, Sigma 10-20mm, 10mm, ISO 100, f/16 @ 1/20sec, 0 EV, pattern metering, tripod

PP:Lightroom 2.6
cropped about 1/3 from bottom
exposure adjustment: set black and white points, highlight recovery, boosted clarity and saturation
tone curve: darks down, lights up
some sharpening

struggled with this one, not sure how to deal with the problems-blues oversaturated? C&C welcome!:)

[Dave Mills]

Hi Julie, I think you did a pretty good job on this. Image looks like it's divided about 60/40 with great clouds and warm light.I even like the little bush on the far left. IMO the blue doesn't look oversaturated to a point that it bothers me...

[Julie Brown]

Thank you Dave. I liked the bush too, that's why I left it in. My challenge was to keep the strong sunlight in check and retain the colors in the water and sky.:)

[Jeff Parker]

I like it. The blues might be a little overdone, but I still like it.

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hi Julie,
I think the split works nicely here but I may have preferred a stronger focal point. That being said.....maybe because I'm partial to blues I still feel it works! You may want to add the opposite color in color balance (yellow in this case) or even red as it may have a bit of cyan cast......or just pull back the blue saturation to see how you like that. I'm not the biggest fan of the bush.....as it protrudes from the frame bottom......so for my tastes I would lose it. I do wonder if lightening the top portion would help restore some balance as usually our eye sees a reflection slightly darker than the sky......as presented it is too even toned so lightening the sky may help visually balnce this more. Just some food for thought.

[Julie Brown]

Thank you Jeff and Roman for the additional comments.
I reworked the image in Lightroom:
cloned out the bush
took the blue saturation slider back to zero
boosted the red hue, saturation, and luminance
removed the GND that I had applied to the sky

so, what do you think? did I go to far with the reds? :)

[Kerry Perkins]

I like the repost Julie! I think the colors work better together now, but I'm no landscape expert. Just know what I like! ;)

[Julie Brown]

Thanks Kerry!:)

[Dave Mills]

Hi Julie,Warmer image but I like the clouds in the original since they had more detail....

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hi Julie,
I did like the warmth of the re-post but the clouds did lose a little bit. I took it into PS and lost track of the layers after 10! I started by knocking the contrast down globally first on the sky.....then pulled back some of the highlights in the sky. I then went in with smaller layer in the sky from selective color to brightness contrast and even desaturated the yellows a touch and added blue in color balance. Probably easier on a larger file but just wanted to show you where some additional tweaking could bring you. Let me know your thoughts.
PS May have a sloppy layer in the brightest area....but you get the idea.

[Julie Brown]

Roman, thanks for the instructions. I will have to go into PSE and try to duplicate what you did. I think I got myself lost in the PP because I wasn't sure what to do after the basic exposure adjustments. I use Lightroom and PSE (just learning).

I see the what you and Dave are talking about in your repost.:)