Critique I SOLD one!! :) Help choosing photos for club exhibition PLEASE!!

[brman]

I think melanie puts it well, there is no point trying to make a picture something it isn't. I am sure you would rather valet a new ferrari than a 20 year old rusty fiesta..... ;-)
That doesn't mean you cannot do anything with these pictures, just don't over do them making them something they are not. Unless there is s specific affect you are after of course.
So, taking the deer shots as an example, when you tried to make them high contrast and full of impact it didn't work. However the edit that shows one as it was (ie soft light, natural look) makes it quite a nice picture.

The car is a interesting one. It was obviously a high contrast scene to start with so should give lots of impact. I agree that your last edit doesn't work, the saturation and colour on the previous one is better. I don't think it is a sharpening problem either (assuming Jordon is looking at the same problem as me). It still has large halos round the front (dark) and back (light). I think these are due to over-use of highlight and shadow adjustment. Have you done a lot of adjustment on these?

 

[brman]

btw. on this halo thing, these two pics might help. This is a shot I took a while ago where I didn't really know what I wanted when I took it, so I ended up with a semi-silhouette aircraft and a washed out sky. In an attempt to make it interesting I did the first edit.
Apache, SPTA. 7 by tobyjm, on Flickr
Hopefully you can see that it has a large pale halo around the aircraft. If you don't see what I mean by halo in this case it is the fact that the sky tone lightens as it gets close to the dark aircraft (over a distance equivelent to the size of its wheels).
This was edited in Nikons Capture NX2 which I used a lot at the time.

I have just pulled up the orginal and done a very quick edit in lightroom. Massive adjustments to curves, highlights and shadows.....

you will see that, despite roughly similar tones, the large halo has gone. So lightroom has done a much better job in this respect.

What you will still see in the 2nd picture though is a thin white halo around the aircraft, a few pixels wide (particularly obvious up the front edge of the fin and the bottom of the aircraft). This is a sharpening halo which does show excessive sharpening. This is present in the 1st picture too but it was the large halo affect in the 1st picture I wanted to highlight.

Hopefully this shows your the different types of halos we are talking about. You have a problem with the former I think so you need to look at your adjustments to shadows, highlights, curves, etc.

The other point though is that I used to suffer a lot with this when trying large adjustments. In those days I used captureNX2 and elements 9. I now use Lightroom 4 99% of the time and (as the 2nd image shows) it really doesn't have that problem. So, I guess if you really must do extreme processing then maybe try a few other editing packages like lightroom?

 

[melaniejane]

I think Lightroom changed a few versions ago (can't remember which) to a much better processing engine (or whatever it uses). Even when making fairly major changes, I find it hard to mess up a picture now - unlike the bad old days!

 

[Raptor Mike]

btw. on this halo thing, these two pics might help. This is a shot I took a while ago where I didn't really know what I wanted when I took it, so I ended up with a semi-silhouette aircraft and a washed out sky. In an attempt to make it interesting I did the first edit.
Apache, SPTA. 7 by tobyjm, on Flickr
Hopefully you can see that it has a large pale halo around the aircraft. If you don't see what I mean by halo in this case it is the fact that the sky tone lightens as it gets close to the dark aircraft (over a distance equivelent to the size of its wheels).
This was edited in Nikons Capture NX2 which I used a lot at the time.

I have just pulled up the orginal and done a very quick edit in lightroom. Massive adjustments to curves, highlights and shadows.....

you will see that, despite roughly similar tones, the large halo has gone. So lightroom has done a much better job in this respect.

What you will still see in the 2nd picture though is a thin white halo around the aircraft, a few pixels wide (particularly obvious up the front edge of the fin and the bottom of the aircraft). This is a sharpening halo which does show excessive sharpening. This is present in the 1st picture too but it was the large halo affect in the 1st picture I wanted to highlight.

Hopefully this shows your the different types of halos we are talking about. You have a problem with the former I think so you need to look at your adjustments to shadows, highlights, curves, etc.

The other point though is that I used to suffer a lot with this when trying large adjustments. In those days I used captureNX2 and elements 9. I now use Lightroom 4 99% of the time and (as the 2nd image shows) it really doesn't have that problem. So, I guess if you really must do extreme processing then maybe try a few other editing packages like lightroom?

WOW I see what you mean. I think rather than any hardware my next purchase for photography should be lightroom.

Thank you so much everybody for all you helpful advice and time. I hope that I can get good enough to help someone else out one day as you all have with me

 

[Raptor Mike]

SO thank you all so much for your help everyone but I still need to choose 5 photos lol. If you voted I assume you can see the resaults??
Anyway I'm going for:

8

3

4

5

And a new entry:

There's still time to change a few around other considerations are:
Sold this on on 500px... somehow lol

or this one:

No matter how bad thay are I still need to enter 5 lol, so if you think I should change a few please say. I've got until a week Tuesday to print and mount. Luckily I have an A3 printer and a mount board cutter.

 

[Raptor Mike]

So the three that were chosen by the comitte for idsplay where the lion giraffes and the bike. A one of the mooring posts and the Dalwood Bridge one went into the browsers. And guess what... I sold the one of Dalwood Bridge. A3 print mounted in a 50x40 mount (I do my own mounting) for £25. Enough to cover my costs of all five prints. Resault!!

 

[brman]

A great result. Well done!

 

[ancient_mariner]

Congrats Mike.

 

[Raptor Mike]

Congrats Mike.

Thanks