Need help with color balance

[Bob Miller]

Nikon D-300 1/80 sec f8
ISO200
34 mm

Took this shot in Shenandoah Va. Somehow it doesn't look right to me. Is there someting wrong with the color balance? i have tried to correct color balance with little luck! Can anyone help?
All comments welcome!

[Nick Palmieri]

Hi Bob, I will leave it to the moderators to make the final judgment on a color cast but it doesn't look likea problem to me. I love the layered look to the mountains and you have an interesting sky. The only thing I may change is to open up the shadows a bit on the right. Nice overall image.

[Hazel Grant]

I certainly am not a moderator, but wanted to share my thoughts. My first impression was what a great shot it is, expecially of the soft, dreamy distant hills and sky. But like you, I felt a bit uncomfortable and think it is the contrast of the sharpness of the green hill vs that dreaminess. I did a tiny quick playing with it and a crop to try to llet that beautiful distance dominate. Maybe it's an improvement, maybe not. All depends on what your vision is.

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hi Bob,
I like the vivid greens of the FG.....that's why we used Velvia!....but it is strong for some tastes. I took it into PS and in color balnce slid it towards Magenta -7 and -8 on blues.....then did a levels layer on the FG to lighten it again. This did a few things...added a bit of warmth to the sky and knocked down some of the green tinge. I would just patch the greens protruding into bottom of the frame as I like the rocks.
Let me know if this adresses some of your concerns.

[Dave Mills]

Hi Bob, All I did was take Romans repost and cropped it a bit to show another way of presentation. I also took out a few of those plants in the foreground...

[Dave Mills]

I posted the original instead of my cropped version previously

[Jackie Schuknecht]

Sometimes Bob if there are no whites to give you the RGB values I sometimes put an image through the photo filters in CS4 at about 10 percent and see which one looks best.

[Roger Clark]

Bob,
To me all the images have a magenta cast.
I took the image Dave posted and selected the sky region and ran it through levels:

red middle input slider to 1.09, green middel input slider to 0.9, blue input slider to 0.5 and blue output to 230.
This removed the magenta cast and put in a tobacco color like a sunset. I'm doing this on an uncalibrated laptop, so hopefully it's not too extreme.

Roger

[David Thomasson]

I grew up in this part of the country, so I am understandably partial to these mountains. Very nice capture.

The posted image looks pretty close to right to me. The main thing that jumped at me was the cyan/greenish
hue in the middle ground of the mountains. I used a selective color adjustment layer to tweak that in the cyans panel:

http://img246.imageshack.us/img246/641/cyans.jpg http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/5376/shenandoaha.gif



Greens (as in foliage) are predominantly yellow, so they can be goosed in the yellows panel of selective color. I was
just aiming to give them a little more of a sunny feel.

http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/5848/yellows.jpg http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/994/shenandoah1.gif

http://img2.imageshack.us/img2/9635/shenandoah.jpg

[Bob Miller]

Thanks for all the input ! Lots of things for me to try! Now the work begins......I will begin work on the photo and repost soon.

[Roman Kurywczak]

David Nailed it!

[Bob Miller]

This is my repost after using many of the fine suggestions! Thanks to all!

[Kobus Tollig]

Some great posts here. GReat shot well done on this. I think i like Dave's PP.