Your original was rendered extremely dark, Russell. It's a simple landscape scene ... rendered up with a bit bit of balancing between water and sky, you get this rather nice, rather serene feel out of it. I took the liberty of doing a couple of edits to give you an idea where I'd go with it... It includes your original so you can see the differences easily.
http://homepage.mac.com/godders/rk2882/ This is a case where if I was using Lightroom I could likely do most of what I did with its tools, and presuming I had the RAW file to work with, but with just an 8bit image file to work with Photoshop allows the kind of gentle, selective editing required to bring this up. 1- Don't underexpose. Determine where the brightest elements are that you want to retain detail in and expose correctly for that ... Placing exposure properly like that takes a little time to figure out and if you're not sure you should bracket exposure around it. The histogram shows you an approximation based on values in the JPEG preview that is rendered for every file, but if you're capturing in RAW you can work with what looks like a little bit of highlight overexposures on the histogram. It's not rigorously calibrated, you have to work with it to understand what you're seeing. 2- Yes, this is a problem. Your screen looks overly bright compared to the ambient light and that's tricking your eye. Better to calibrate and profile the screen in modest, normal room light and work that way so that your eyes and the screen are at proper luminance values. I calibrate my screen for 140 lumens, gamma 1.8 and 5500K white point in normal, indirect room illumination. Move any light that glares on the screen to a different position so that's not a problem. This will make a huge difference in how your photos come out. Godfrey On Apr 2, 2007, at 12:04 PM, Russell Kerstetter wrote: > Thanks Bruce, PJ, Paul, Markus Shel and Brian for being honest. When > I look at it objectively, I agree that it is mostly an uninteresting > picture. Maybe next time I will try the 'Auto Compose' function on my > DL. > > I have been told several times, that my pictures are too dark. To be > clear, we are talking a few stops dark, but not black or anything like > that, right? > > I think there are two issues here (if anyone cares to comment > further): > > 1) Foremost, I think I have a tendency to underexpose, specifically > on shots like this. I really like detail in the clouds and am afraid > of losing it even when the clouds are not the most important aspect of > the picture. IIRC the histogram for this shot had the highlights > touching the first bar from the right (which is a half-stop right?) > but I think that what you are seeing on your screen is probably darker > than just a half-stop. > > 2) I usually work in a dark room because I hate glare off the screen. > I have been running my mac on gamma 1.8 instead of 2.2, but from what > I am hearing I think that is a negligible part of my problem. > > Russ > (here to learn) > > On 4/1/07, Russell Kerstetter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> This is a reservoir/lake near my mother-in-law's house. Also this is >> the first photo I have processed with iPhoto. I was using Lightroom >> beta, iPhoto definately has less features and some irritating >> limitations, but it does have the 'touch-up' tool, which is pretty >> handy. >> >> http://www.avocadohead.com/piclinks/IMGP2882.html >> >> Honest comments please, thanks for looking. >> >> Russ >> >> -- >> Legacy Air, Inc. >> 11900 Airport Way >> Broomfield Colorado 80021 >> (303) 404-0277 >> fax (303) 404-0280 >> www.legacy-air.com >> > > > -- > Legacy Air, Inc. > 11900 Airport Way > Broomfield Colorado 80021 > (303) 404-0277 > fax (303) 404-0280 > www.legacy-air.com > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > PDML@pdml.net > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
