I took this photo on the road between the Tetons and Yellowstone it looked so pretty I had to stop. I desaturated leaving some color then ran a NR thru cs4. My first nite shot , so let me know what I did wrong so I don't repeat same mistakes! Thanks Still looks like there is alot of noise.
Denise,
I like your comp overall. You have some nice layers with the FG bushes, middle trees, and BG hill. The muted colors are very much the way we see at twilight, though personally I think I'd like just a touch more saturation in the mid-tones.
To nit-pick, I might crop down from the top to put the horizon nearer the thirds position. I might also have tried to compose with the moon just a bit farther left (if that didn't require swimming;)).
I think you've got a good exposure. In this sort of night image, where the main interest is in the landscape, I don't mind the moon being solid white. Until someone develops a camera with a 20-stop dynamic range, that's all we can do in a single exposure. If you wanted to show detail in the moon, you'd need to take a 2nd exposure at about "sunny 16" (the moon is reflecting direct sunlight), and blend the two.
Don't know if you're seeing noise in the full-res image or in the post. All I see in the post is some jpeg artifacts along the tree/sky and plant/water boundaries. 58KB is a pretty small file. In Photoshop, if you use "save for web" instead of "save as", you can tell it to optimize quality to a certain file size. (Thanks to Fabs for explaining this to me.) Click the little black triangle at the upper right corner of the "save for web" dialog, then select "Optimize to file size", and tell it "200K" for BPN. That has the side effect of removing all the metadata from the file.
I agree with pretty much everything Chris said above. It's a very good twilight photo that would have been even stronger with detail in the moon and moving the moon a bit more out of the center position. I think for your first nighttime photo you did very well! I especially like the idea of desaturating the image without removing all the color - it fits the twilight scenery very nicely.
You have a very fine image Lady Denise. I like the feel and mood. Very good advise was given by your BPN brother and sister. I would suggest increasing the contrast just a tad; my personal taste...:D;):) You are doing very well; I'm so proud of you, remember what I told you...from the heart...:cool:
Grand Teton Moon
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