Could some photographically minded people please offer comments about the processing in particular? Have I overdone it?
Some of these were JPEG originals (damn those settings - I have now saved my sunrise landscape settings to one of the custom locations on the dial...), so these were just done in PS (CS5) using vibrance, curves, levels, shadows & highlights and unsharp mask. Basically just fiddling with these until I got something I liked. Coming back to them again now, some of them seem a little heavy handed....?
Most of the processing of the RAW ones was done in Adobe Camera Raw - fantastic bit of kit that, with just some very minor tweaking in PS.
Here are links to the larger versions - should be in same order as the ones below:
Great shots. A few comments.
Firstly a big part of photography is the quality of the light. Unfortunately in several of these shots it was a gloomy grey day and this detracts. More to do with when you take the shot rather than technique.
The twilight images look underexposed. Twilight does not have to mean a dark image. I think it would look nicer brightened up. Perhap there is enough signal in the image to take some curves and brighten it up.
Composition is very good and colours all look good.
Thanks Greg. I think I am having problems with my monitor. It is uncalibrated, and when I print these images on my Epson printer, they are dark as well, but on my monitor they look a lot brighter.
Is there any way besides getting one of those little monitor calibration doohickeys to check it?
What you're suffering from is incorrect white balance.
In Digital Photo Professional, use the Click White Balance tool and click on areas which are neutral grey (or, failing that, white). You'll find that it'll warm your images up and they'll pop.
As for printing -- your printer will /always/ print darker than what you see on screen. Even on my 78xx series printer, I make a test strip of 24" wide, with each image 2.4" wide (ten side by side). In Photoshop I brighten (levels, by adjusting midtone slider) each by 0.1 increments and print the lot out in a strip (so, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3...0.9, 1.0). The one that looks best, I apply that adjustment globally and print.
thanks H. I did a quick reprocess of the first image this morning after correcting the white balance as you suggested, and it does look a lot better. I think the overall gloomy-ness that Greg mentioned was due to the blue cast (which was very obvious when you compared it against the WB-corrected version). It also bought out the oranges of the sky alot more as an added bonus.
I will post the changes I made when I get home today.
