Enlightenment T2by
obsidianComment: ::: Critique Club :::
Hi from the critique club, this is a pleasure to do Carl as i know you have impeccible taste. Just look at the camera you use for a start.
This was an interesting challenge, the chance to put all those comments from last time into practice this time. You must be gutted that it scored worse second time around that the first! Let's see if we can work out why.
First Impressions:
I'm really puzzled here because when I first looked at it, the appearance was of a very low resolution image (around 1.5mpx) that had been post processed to death. That's not a brilliant start for sure. Certainly the bad halo right around the buddah got my attention before any other part of the image.
Subject:
It's a good subject and the potential is certainly there and particularly the first time around because the blue and orange make perfect complimentary colours. i think too it was right that you picked this for a Take II because it batted below it's potential the first time and your architectural work is so good that re-doing one of those wouldn't achieve much.
Composition:
Maybe the central location is not the best position. Certainly thirds can make a big difference to an image by allowing some neutral space into the pic and giving the subject a sort of breathing space. Perhaps by making it slightly less in-your-face might have worked. Certainly since you had the opportunity for a second go, i would have tried that.
Technical (Colour, light & focus):
Alas, 'tis here that it all fell apart didn't it. There's something that I can't figure out. As many have commented it does look 'soft' yet there are horrid spotty artifacts all over the place such as what you would normally expect from over-sharpening. The more I study it, would I be correct in assuming that you have been working with a JPEG rather than a TIFF and that you have been saving it as you go along?
Why I ask is that it looks like all your colour has broken down such as happens when you continually re-save a JPEG. A JPEG re-saved will re-compress what has already bee compressed and eventually will just about kill itself. Around the mouth looks like crumbs but are breakdowns of the file's integrity somehow. On those spots, since you had Advanced editing, you could have cloned a lot of those out. The same effect has happened in the glow behind the head, you can almost see the gradations as the file struggles to smooth the colour shift. I think it is this breakdown, whatever its cause, that has turned the voters off the image.
If you shoot with and edit the TIFF, you can force your colour shifts without loosing data like you have and if you use Adjustment Layers instead of directly editing the pixels in your image, you can always backtrack when it turns to poop.
Was it out of focus to start with or has it gone like that from the editing? I wondered how big the Buddah is and if a lot of the loss of detail is because in reality it is only and inch tall and so you are in the extreme macro area. If that's the case, it's very difficult to get right. Detail is mushy with a cast object like this and DOF is damned hard to get right.
Growing the Vote:
I am guessing the difference in scores might largely be because last time it DID have lovely complimentary colours, popular ones at that. This time of course, you didn't have that crutch.
Summary:
Oh well, an interesting learning exercise? Actually, if it was me and I had the time, I might go back and have a third go at this. It's shots like these were you can learn 400% more than with an average to good one. There may be a couple of things you do that suddenly make this the image that you imagined. I honestly think that is possible (unless Buddah is really only an inch high)
Please let me know your thoughts
Cheers
Brett
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