Learning Thread — Landscape Photography

05/14/2006 06:23:17 PM · #527

Originally posted by samchad:

I was thinking the very same thing.

It's worth it, though...

R.

05/14/2006 06:24:32 PM · #528

Originally posted by Tallbloke:

OK

I think major improvement after post processing was to move the focus further "into" the shot by dulling down the bright area of foam in the foreground.

Steve

Ain't that a hell of a difference, though?

Edit to add: here's a completely different take on it:

R.

Message edited by author 2006-05-14 18:39:44.

TrollMan

Fujifilm X-T4

Fujifilm XF 35mm f/1.4

05/15/2006 04:13:37 AM · #529

Great lessons Bear - thanks a million! I'm learning a lot.

Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM

05/17/2006 01:18:29 PM · #530

Nobody else wants to break the rules? Sheesh...

R.

samchad

Canon EOS-5D Mark III

05/17/2006 02:01:33 PM · #531

OK - here's one where I tried to break the rules.

//www.samchadwickphoto.com/cuba/pinar/images/IMG_4712e1.jpg

The water is not 1/3 from the bottom, but instead, 1/4. Instead I was aiming for the sun to be 1/3 up from the bottom. But I think it's a little high now I look at it.

In the vertical direction it may actually be ok as the trees are (almost) splitting the image in 3.

I wanted to get it better, but there were other obstacles around that stopped me getting the trees dead on 1/3 and 2/3.

Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM

05/17/2006 02:32:57 PM · #532

Horizon on 1/4, sun centered horizontally and nearly so vertically, trees more-or-less symmetrical around the vertical center axis: yup, that's breaking a few rules :-) It works pretty well for me.

How does this version look to you? NO changes except contrast masking with brights at 100% multiply and the darks at 100% soft light, and a gradient added to the top. NO hue/sat, NO selective color, NO curves or levels...

Robt.

Tallbloke

Canon EOS-350D Rebel XT

05/17/2006 04:51:37 PM · #533

It is kinda interesting looking back through the shots I've taken this year, how many DONT break the rules. Maybe I'm too conventional or maybe my instincts always kick in and I frame stuff in thirds without thinking.

I havent taken any shots yet specifically to break the rules for this thread, but my portfolio is a bit barren of Landscape rule breakers.

Steve

samchad

Canon EOS-5D Mark III

Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM

05/17/2006 05:31:37 PM · #534

Originally posted by Bear_Music:

How does this version look to you? NO changes except contrast masking with brights at 100% multiply and the darks at 100% soft light, and a gradient added to the top. NO hue/sat, NO selective color, NO curves or levels...

Awesome. As always. Man, my Photoshop skills suck. I'll keep trying.

pamelasue

Canon EOS-5D Mark II

Tamron SP AF 28-75mm f/2.8 XR Di for Canon

05/17/2006 05:35:43 PM · #535

Here's my "broken rules" entry ... feel free to hack away at it!

Tamron SP AF 28-75mm f/2.8 XR Di for Canon

05/17/2006 05:39:45 PM · #536

Originally posted by pamelasue:

Here's my "broken rules" entry ... feel free to hack away at it!

pamelasue

Canon EOS-5D Mark II

05/17/2006 05:56:24 PM · #537

Please first tell us the rules you have broken, if you can? And why, if there's a reason? I don't mean to single you out, but the (hopeful) purpose of the exercise is to take "good" pictures that break the "rules" they always tell us to use; therefore, there has to be some sort of conscious factor involved. Do you like it? Why? Does it break a rule? If so, why is it stronger for having done so?

This comment is directed at all who are following this exercise.

Robt.

No worries, I don't mind being singled out ... best way for me to learn!

I like my image, but I'm not in love with it ... to me, it's lacking that "wow" factor that so many of the photos on this site have ... I feel like I've broken the thirds rule ... to me the tree line cuts through the center of the photo and the basic composition doesn't enhance what I was going for ... apparently I really wasn't aware of that rule when I took this photo ...

fracman

Nikon D50

Nikon AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D

05/17/2006 09:47:19 PM · #538

I've been following this thread for over a week, but due to the wonderful rain we've had, I haven't been able to get out and shoot. So, I grabbed this pic from a couple years ago.

//fracman.no-ip.org/dpcpics/IMG_4069.jpg - original
//fracman.no-ip.org/dpcpics/cloudsoverbadlands.jpg - modified

I'm not 100% sure whether my landscape pic breaks the rule of thirds or if this is really a picture of clouds with some land included. I didn't do much to this, straightened the horizon, Shadows/Highlights, contrast mask on highlights (54% Overlay), a saturation layer to make the sky look more normal, and Neat Image.

Jon

Leok

Pentax K10D

Sigma 28-70mm f/2.8 EX DG for Pentax

05/17/2006 10:09:34 PM · #539

Hi all
I just wanted to say a big thank you to Bear for his amazing patience in helping all of us in this and so many other threads

I spent a few hours going through the thread and have tried some of your techniques - just amazing what can be done. The only problem is that now some of the images I was happy enough with to print enlargements of are now looking like they need more work. I was just doing basic levels and saturation tweaking. I never realised how powerful adjusting the saturation per channel was - have tried the same in levels and always ended up with a horrible colour cast.

Thanks again Robt.
Leo

OdysseyF22

Panasonic DC-G9

Olympus 12-45mm f/4.0 Pro

05/18/2006 11:20:26 AM · #540

Sorry for my short absence, I was moving from college back to home for the summer. But I'm here now.

What Robert did to my winter mountain shot was AMAZING! I thought I had it PPed okay, then I saw his. Those are steps to keep in mind, as they really did add so much depth. When I look back now, my version looks totally flat.

And I have to agree, my rule-breaking was tepid at best. At the time, it was raining for days stright and I went through the archives to find something. Now that the weather is improved, I'll go out and try to shoot something specifically for this in the next day or two and will post it.

Thank you!

05/18/2006 12:10:32 PM · #541

Originally posted by pamelasue:

I like my image, but I'm not in love with it ... to me, it's lacking that "wow" factor that so many of the photos on this site have ... I feel like I've broken the thirds rule ... to me the tree line cuts through the center of the photo and the basic composition doesn't enhance what I was going for ... apparently I really wasn't aware of that rule when I took this photo ...

Pamela:

The first "broken rule" here is the one should almost never break in landscape photography; the image is not "squared up"; the verticals are leaning WAY to the right, and it is obvious that the implied horizon is not level.

The second "broken rule" is that the image is divided vertically into two halves, basically. Now, THAT'S a rule that can often be broken to good effect in water shots with lots of reflection.

I have tried working with the image, but it's so underexposed in the dark areas and already processed to such a degree that trying to work my "magic" on it just brings out nasty artifacts. In any case, you have one more serious problem: the picnic table lower left is just plain annoying. If you could see all of it, it wouldn't be too bad, but just the top is like a mistake, you know? Now, you can crop it out, after rotating, but the end result is a LESS symmetrical composition that doesn't work especially well due to the elimination of reflective balance in the right foreground especially. You can CLONE it out, which is what I'd do if I were reprocessing from scratch.

But really, in this case the solution would have been to reframe the image from a slightly closer vantage point or from further to the right, to eliminate the table altogether.

In any event, for what it's worth, the following is the best I've come up with, and I've actually spent more time on this than any of the others:

Cloned out the table, rotated dramatically, did several passes of contrast masking in different modes, worked very strenuously with selective color in many channels to try to clean up the color and make it more "attractive", and sharpened. Note that on this one I did NOT use a sky gradient, because there's too much delicacy up there to support it and the natural gradient is anyway pretty interesting.

Pay particular attention to the rotation, because that's the real key here; it "looks" level now. The final result really isn't any sort of compositional "rule breaker"; it's normal enough and reasonably close to a rule of thirds water/everything else division, plus the extra "weight" on the right side is also reasonably ROT-oriented...

Robt.

Nikon AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D

05/18/2006 12:44:07 PM · #542

Originally posted by fracman:

I'm not 100% sure whether my landscape pic breaks the rule of thirds or if this is really a picture of clouds with some land included. I didn't do much to this, straightened the horizon, Shadows/Highlights, contrast mask on highlights (54% Overlay), a saturation layer to make the sky look more normal, and Neat Image.

original

his edit

my edit

Fracman's done a fine job of taking a TRULY ugly-looking, flat-lit original and making a workable image out of it. I have done some tweaking on his edit to give more punch to the foreground by varying saturation and brightness of the red and yellow channels, and toned down the extreme blue a little bit. I also brought up a little more "weight" in the clouds.

The image definitely breaks the "rule" of where the horizon should be, devoting nearly all the image to the sky and just grounding it with a strip of earth. It was done purposefully: any more foreground would be pointless when it is that flatly-lit, and perhaps more importantly this gives us a real sense of the immensity of the sky in this desert place. If he had not included the ground at all, it's "just a sky" and not telling us much of anything. But there's a real sense of place here.

It's not a "great" landscape, mind you, but it's a hell of a rescue job off that original, and it does work nicely as an image of the American Southwest IMO.

R.

fracman

Nikon D50

05/18/2006 01:52:33 PM · #543

Interestingly enough, my early efforts on this image had resulted in something similar to Bear's, and I deliberately backed off. On the clouds, I spent most of my time trying to brighten them, as I felt that the better defined clouds were too dark and didn't imply bright sun and heat as well.

The color of the ground, too, had been backed off. While quite pretty, Bear's version looks more like Sedona or Moab than the Badlands, which tend more towards beige, pinks, and greens than reds and oranges. I would like to know, though, how you toned down the sky. The tone you achieved is more along the lines of what I was trying for, but I couldn't get it right.

I'm having a bunch of fun with this, though, and look forward to the sunlight this weekend to take some pics with a better camera than the S110 used for this one.

Thanks for keeping this going, Bear!

05/18/2006 01:57:20 PM · #544

Originally posted by fracman:

I would like to know, though, how you toned down the sky. The tone you achieved is more along the lines of what I was trying for, but I couldn't get it right.

Hue/saturation adjustment layer, adjust relative brightness, saturation, and hue in both cyan and blue channels.

Regarding the color of the foreground, you can achieve the same "dimensionality" without the amped color by desaturating both red and yellow slightly off my version. The main thing happening here was to adjust the relative BRIGHTNESS of red vs yellow to bring in some contrast. The colors just looked "pretty" to me, so...

Try dropping mine into photoshop and adjust saturation and/or brightness in red and yellow channels to see what I mean.

Robt.

Carl Zeiss 50mm ZE f/1.4 Planar T for Canon

05/18/2006 08:59:02 PM · #545

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

For our next lesson/assignment, we have a guest lecturer who has become famous in his short tenure at DPC: please give a big hand to Mr. Rikki Dy-Liacco, who will be instructing us on how he hyper-saturates his landscape images to create those surreal effects.

I thought it would be fun to include something a little out-of-the ordinary, and our Rikki has kindly consented to join us in this thread for the week.

You'll be hearing from him shortly!

Robt.

yanko

Canon EOS-5D Mark II

05/18/2006 09:07:49 PM · #546

Will everyone need to wear special glasses to view the full reality of his images? :P

buzzrock

Fujifilm X-M1

Fujifilm XC 16-50mm f/3.5-5.6 OIS

05/18/2006 09:30:56 PM · #547

I don't want to hijack this thread since I have not been active on it, but I have a "landscape" question, and thought it would be better addressed in here rather than starting a new thread--

I am wondering how to frame a picture that has multiple horizon lines.
(I dont know if I'm using the right words?)

Here's the pic--

lament

Pentax K100D

Pentax FA 50mm F1.7 AF

05/18/2006 11:43:34 PM · #548

*sneaks in quietly*

Dead-center horizon:
//gallery.z3.ca/d/10709-1/dike.jpg

I tried cropping some of the sky or land to make it fit the rule of thirds, but it just looks worse - either too busy or too empty.