Hello!
I watch all the CTC videos and have been intrigued by a lot of the comments made. Also, I've taken some feedback others here have given and have recently decided to do some re-edits and I'd be curious for your opinions.
Please let me know what you think. The first image is the original. The second is the re-edit.
Thanks in advance for your help and opinion.
-Derek
I think your re-edits are better! Both of the originals looked a bit underexposed. Nice work!
Thank you, John! I appreciate it.
In the first re-edit, you're close to blowing the highlights in the sunset. The colors are losing all their saturation. I would try to bring up the darker tones without touching the orange sky.
In the second re-edit, you definitely DID blow the highlights. The far background mountaintops (or maybe clouds?) are lost in the blown highlights, but they are more accurately exposed in the original edit. Again, you need to take care to protect the brightest parts of the image while adjusting only the darker shadows. EDIT: These are not the same photo; they were taken from two different locations. Did you mean to upload a different set of images?
In both of these, you can accomplish what you want by careful manual masking, or, if your software offers it, luminosity masking. Of course, neither will work if there is no data to retain. If these are JPEG originals, I fear the highlights in images 3 & 4 are gone.
Thank you, Phillip. I will look and see what I can do. They are all RAW files. And you're right, I uploaded the wrong file for the third and fourth image. Same concept, so the point is well taken.
Also, just for a little perspective on the bottom two images. I took them on my honeymoon in Scotland a couple years ago. I forgot my tripod, so this is a set of seven shots I took by hand. It was so bright in the middle of those clouds I really needed to do multiple exposures to retain the detail. I think regardless of what I do the middle of the mountains are gone.
Derek,
The re-edits are definitely an improvement.
As some previous comments mentioned, luminosity masking will help you to exposure blend from one raw file.
Nice images.
Thank you, Roger!
Derek - I forgot to ask - What is a CTC video?
Critique the community. All of the contests end with a YouTube video talking about 20 of the photos submitted,
Douhhhhh. Sorry.