Oxbow Bend

[Rachel Hollander]

Another image I have revisited. I shot this in 2008 (before I shot in RAW and upgraded cameras ). Just after dawn at Oxbow Bend in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.

Rebel XT
16-35 @ 35 mm
1/400
f10
ISO 400
HH, levels and curves adjustment, Robert's highlight adjustment, selective dodging, LCE and sharpened using the action posted by Morkel.

C&C welcome and appreciated.

Thanks,
Rachel

[Brendan Dozier]

Beautiful grand scene, Rachel, love the rich colors, spectacular looking snow covered mountains, and that awesome crystal clear reflection. Nicely captured & composed image. The sharpness & contrast looks good to me. The only minor thing I find is some noise in sky and water, and the very tiny ripple specks on the left side of reflection - in the light blue area. Maybe they are too sharpened? Just seemed a little "dirty" looking. My eye wanted that area to be balanced more with the clear right side. Tried a version without them and did some NR on sky and water and just a tad more darkening of the mountains.

[Rachel Hollander]

Thanks Brendan. Here's a repost following your suggestions.

Rachel

[Don Railton]

Hi Rachel

I'm a sucker for lake/mountain shots like this and yes, I love this one too. Pity the reflection is not perfect but almost is good enough sometimes... You cannot always wait around for the wind. My only consideration for any improvement beyond Brendans 'ripple' already addressed is like the deeper blue in the immediate foreground is much stronger than deepest blue in the sky. I understand that this is most likely due to more foreground being included but I wonder if the image balance might be enhanced if the upper fringe of the sky matched the lower immediate foreground blue? Just a thought...

Well done.

Don

[Robert Amoruso]

Don,

Reflections will generally be darker and more saturated then the sky being reflected.

Rachel,

I realize this is a low-res JPG but the banding and posterization in the lower FG is bothersome. Even w/o it, I feel placing the horizon at the center and balancing the symmetry of the image with a crop from the bottom is worth trying.

[Don Railton]

Hi Robert.

Thanks for the clarification regarding reflections. Something else I should learn to see with my photography... I guess your suggestions will also achieve the colour balance i was considering...

Don

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Rachel,
Some good ideas above. My personal preference would be for less sky to a 1/3 and 2/3 water.

[Andrew McLachlan]

Hi Rachel, lovely mountain and lake scene. I think this would also make a lovely panoramic.

[Rachel Hollander]

Thanks Don, Robert, Roman and Andrew for the comments. I'll take a look at the suggested crops.

Rachel

[Andrew Aveley]

heya , great scene with some interesting processing :) I am of course more a pano man so a 6x17 or 9 x 17 crop is worth a look at :)

[Morkel Erasmus]

One of your better "lake shots" for me Rachel (at least in terms of detail and clarity)...not sure if it's the sharpening action...how are you finding working with it? The trick is to get the right opacity balance in the end for the scene you are presenting.

I totally support the pano crop here

[Rachel Hollander]

Thanks Andrew and Morkel. Here's a repost with the pano crop. Morkel - the sharpening actions seem good but I do have to play with the opacity, also I'm not in love with the resizing aspect of it and prefer to do that myself. Any way to adjust that to the BPN parameters?

Thanks,
Rachel

[Morkel Erasmus]

Repost looks good, Rachel!

You can reverse-engineer most of those actions to resize to the size you want. If you click on the action and expand the "1000px" setting - do the following:
* Go to the step that reads "Fit Image"
* Expand it
* Double click on the action
* Now you can put in your own constraints - ie 1024
* Now do the same for one of the smaller ones (this will be for vertical images)

Let me know if you struggle to get it right...