Ominous Cloud

http://i106.photobucket.com/albums/m...5ResizeWeb.jpg

Took this recently on a day when there were quite a few thunderstorms around. Nothing close enough to hit us, but I could see a number of impressive looking clouds forming such as this one. Initially I was going for a B&W with this; but while I was playing around in PS, I tried changing the mode of the channel mixer layer to overlay and immediately liked the result. Seemed to give the image an IR feel as well as made the cloud look more ominous. Any C&C are welcome!

Olympus SP-550 UZ
f8.0 @ 1/800, ISO 100
Manual mode, pattern metering
Processed in PS CS2; curves adjustment, channel mixer, shadow/highlight, some noise reduction, and added a vignette

Christopher, I think it does look like an IR image. I might evict the bird as it looks more like a spec. The top of the image has alot of grain. I might lighten the tree line just a bit.

http://i106.photobucket.com/albums/m...ResizeWeb2.jpg

Thanks Denise. I never noticed the bird, so thanks for pointing it out. I've evicted it as well as lightened the treeline and ran some more noise reduction on the top. Let me know what you think.

Christopher, I'm on my laptop. Everything still looks the same except for the bird. Could just be my laptop-

Denise, I can see the difference between the two. Would like to hear what other people have to say.

Christopher, I think you've still got a bit of an issue with the middle grays in the lower part of the cloud...they really seem to be carrying more noise or graininess than the rest of the image. Perhaps masking them off from the overlay treatment or lowering the opacity of that layer a bit would help?

Thanks Julie, I'll see what I can do about that.

Hey Christopher...Fabulous cloud and basically a sound comp. It looks like you added a vignette to the image which in this case I don't think it helps the image....

I would say this is a shot where I would have used HDR. I'd personally like to see the detail in the trees to contrast the dramatic cloud especially in B&W. If this were color and during golden hour, then I'd be more apt to go for the shadowed foreground.

Thanks for the advice. Michael, HDR isn't really an option for me because I don't have a tripod. I agree though this kind of shot would work well as HDR.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Christopher Miller

Thanks for the advice. Michael, HDR isn't really an option for me because I don't have a tripod. I agree though this kind of shot would work well as HDR.

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if you have enough light, you can handhold it Photomatix will match the image. When I have the G10 and find these situations and no pod, I just put it on autoexposure bracketing at +/- 2 Ev