is it a bad thing to add color or is it a giant no-no? obviously for the purist i would be condemned... but for enhancing a photo is it a bad idea?
i placed the original before and after below...
adding color that just isn't there?
is it a bad thing to add color or is it a giant no-no? obviously for the purist i would be condemned... but for enhancing a photo is it a bad idea?
i placed the original before and after below...
I think you can interpret it any way you like unless you work for a newspaper. Was it wrong for Ansel Adams to make stark blacks and whites out of deadly flat scenes?
Hi Joseph!
Interesting. A lot of recent discussion in this group about how much manipulation is OK. We all know where you stand - the more, the better! ;-)
More seriously, though your personal vision seems to me more typical of a painter than a photographer. The latter tend to get bogged down in technical issues. Do you painters discuss your brushes the way photogs do their lenses? I'd wager large money that in general the answer is NO.
I like your edits, the last one the most, presumably reflecting your evolving the idea in the first edit. The photographer in me thought "There isn't a full range of tones in the edits" and I "had" to check on a histogram - and sure enough, Ansel Adams would fail you! Oh I forget, you're a painter, so it's OK.
Your final image captures a sombre, even slightly sad but not depressing mood, perhaps more a calm, contemplative one, evident only in the bottom of the original, and pretty much destroyed by the brightly sunlit areas and sky. And your final image doesn't look lurid, the way over-saturated photos so often do.
You'd better go and do it in oils, it'd make a great painting.
Yours is an interesting and refreshing voice amid us photo-anoraks. Actually, I love most visual art genres, and keep being tempted to paint again.
Keep posting! Perhaps the version in oils...
Here's my edit of your edit, further emphasising the colours and "gloom", and the texture in the foreground rocks. The latter in particular may by antithetical to what you're aiming for, robbing some of the mystery & being too literal.
The photographer in me marvels at the world as it is, and wants to share what I see (hey, look at these rocks!), but it strikes me that there's much less imagination in this approach than in most painting.
this is where I'm befuddled ...the limits/tolerance of the deep darks as i have learned from others that it is about the smallest details especially retaining even the smallest parts of detail in the shadow areas but then i think of a painter like Carravagio who used extremes and was able to create ridiculously dramatic images with losing the details that were less important
I think these extremes of light work because the subject matter is spatially very defined. Its trickier to do something like this if you're talking about landscape.
I share your befuddlement to a degree, Joseph.
My best guess about this is that when a photo is perceived as a representation of the real world, then large areas of featureless black, on screen or in print, just look bad, somewhat oppressive is how I'd describe it. Probably large areas of featureless uniform grey or colour would also look bad, and boring. We accept featureless white sometimes, e.g. in high-key or high-contrast black-&-white images.
Perhaps this applies less in very stark, contrasty and more abstract images, but even then I think large featureless black areas look bad.
Possibly our eyes are instinctively drawn to featureless shadow because at some basic survival-instinct level we are always scanning the environment for threat, and are uncomfortable with inscrutable darkness.
I was joking about Ansel above, but I've found that when I finish processing an image to my satisfaction, so it just looks right, the histogram ends up more like a plateau than when I started, more evenly spread between the darkest and lightest shades i.e. tends to follow Adams' dictum about the proverbial full spread of tones. (I'm never looking at the histogram TRYING to make it flat as I work. It just happens.) Go figure!
Perhaps we don't tend to see paintings so much as rather literal representations of the world, so this may not apply as much. In painting, too, the blacks are rarely featureless, and in oil or acrylic have surface texture catching the light for a start. There are quite a lot of "all black" overtly featureless non-representational paintings, no two alike.
This is a great shot, foreground rocks are beautifully framed. I think this type of shot would benefit more from a dodge and burn job than a coloring job.
im not a fan of dodge and burn it seems to mess with the colors of an image if i want an area fixed i usually select an are and tweak it with curves or levels and blend on a separate layer then blend it in it seems to retain the base structure of the color ...but that's just a preference.
in which ares would you illuminate or recede
You can d&b by masking curve layers with a luminosity blend mode, It shouldn't change your colors though the luminosity change could give that perception. Maybe making the water dark in the foreground while lighting up some of the foreground rocks could give an interesting effect.
Like I said before, photography is a form of art - you're the artist and it's up to you what to do with your work.
It all boils down to audience, if you want a large audience then it's wiser not to stray too far from what's generally accepted. If you don't care about audience then you're free to do whatever you want.
very true Thorsten you are absolutely correct, the area i want to be in i believe is the middle. Free to do what i like to do but still have someone that would hang the image in their own home. i don't want to be that guy who thinks their piece is amazing and everyone else in the world walks by and says eww no thank you... lol