Very harsh light conditions when this image was captured.
Bit tight, but had to crop Andreas's Bakkie out, then try and balance the comp.
Take more from the top, the tree behind becomes a dark blob that might distract.
I do not think I was close enough for the IQ to handle a massive crop to do faces only.
Hello Andre , Nice Action , certainly the lighting is harsh , you could have also cloned out the small dry plant on the left. Also there is some scope for increasing the sharpness .
Hi Andre i very much like your chosen title , fits very well to the image .
Very powerful looking image with nice handing of a difficult light situation , i do not mind at all the harsh light when because it gave us a wonderful action to witness and photograph.
I am fine with all the "distracting elements " in the frame .
I think from my POV things could be pushed a bit ........... WDYT ? of my view maybe i went a bit overboard .
Hi Andre - Great action with the legs churning and all the kicked up dust. You handled the harsh light well. As I am sure you know, I too would leave the plant. Andreas's rp has brought out more detail especially in the body. Nice one.
Love the action, dust and drama here Andre, with the RP by Andreas taking this further, but what I like best is that you have good eye contact with both gnu's and that's
not always easy especially with these guys.
Hi Andre, like the interaction and overall composition here. The plumes of dust and body posture conveys nicely the action. I do think Andreas's RP has taken it to where it need to go in terms of tonal depth/impact, but if there was more USM added then perhaps a little less, not much, but again personal taste.
I don't think harsh conditions requires extreme PP, it's just getting the balance right, don't get bogged down with all the 'tricks' as your vision will wonder.
TFS
Steve
Last edited by Steve Kaluski; 03-16-2015 at 11:16 AM.
Hi Steve , just to clarify and that you see what i did with Andreīs image .
The īDMī action is basically working with inverted RGB composites and blurring them with the Smart Blur filter , target is to darken the HL and lifting the shadows , buy using the SB filter you get detail back that is lost when multiply or screen the specific areas . That is the theory behind the action , one can do this all manually but the action can do this for you. There are at least for options to alter the final result in terms of opacity . You end up with a group that has 4 layers and the overall group with a layer mask .So you can go way lower or higher as i did , i was on 50% on the layers and 60% on the whole group.
Hi Andreas, it's probably a multitude of things, plus using a web image in the first place that can compound things. What caught my eye was the front, right legs of the WB, the darker tonal areas are just more pronounced, hence saying, 'if any...' . Certainly give more tonal range had added more depth.
You are right Steve with your observation , by using this action it comes as a multitude of things together , but if wished i could have lowered opacity for the shadows to have them less lightened/detailed , but for demo i kept it higher to see what can be extracted . And yes if used on a HiRes file you get better results , because the settings of the action are designed to work on HiRes files not that much on a web size image , the effects are becoming more intense as you know .