Alberta Falls

[Tom Shaffer]

Alberta Falls, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO. Camera Minolta Maxxum 5. Scanned slide. Lens settings not recorded

[Chris Starbuck]

Tom,
You have a nice diagonal composition in the water flow, from upper right to lower left, and used a good shutter speed to show the flow well. Lots of interesting details in the rock & ice. It's a bit overexposed, though, and has lost detail in the highlights, as well as losing color saturation. That could be in the scanner - take another look at the original slide and rescan if the highlights are there. With the current scan, you can bring back quite a bit of color in the mid-tones by duplicating the image layer, setting the blending mode to multiply, with an opacity around 30%.

[Tom Shaffer]

Chris thanks for your comments . I compares the histograms of the original file to the jpg. You are right, the jpg histogram indicates it is a little blown out but the original is not. I did not think to check this when I did my conversion. However, I can correct this problem under Shadows/Highlights in CS3. I scsnned the original and then went to Camera Raw and made a dng and then a new tif. Converting to sRBG and jpg does alter the picture. I am new to this conversion to jpg as I never use jpg's in my normal operations.

[Chris Starbuck]

Tom,
Yeah, jpeg compression loves to throw away small tonal variations, which is where all highlight detail lives. I use jpg for the web and for camera club competitions (projected images), where it's required, but keep all my masters in psd format and print from those. I don't think sRGB affected this image, but it's a real pain for images with saturated reds and yellows -- blocks them up into mud. I always soft proof such images and readjust the saturation and lightness in the red & yellow channels to make them look their best within the constraints of sRGB, before doing the conversion.

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Tom,
See Chris addressed the whites/highlights.........so if recoverd.....the flow of the water will be very nice. I would be tempted to crop out (or digitally remove if you are not against such things...).....the twigs that are on the top ice........but the white recovery may tone them down enough also........thus minimize their impact. Look forward to the re-post.

[Robert Amoruso]

Tom,

Chris and Roman captured my thoughts on your image perfectly. I very much like the flow of the water through the image and agree that losing the branch at the top will strengthen the image.