A recent Autumn morning on Rannoch Moor

LongLensPhotography said:
1st one is excellent.

I am just not sure why second one is edited so differently. It doesn't quite do it the justice it deserves.
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They're over 2 hours apart. The light in the first was really intense, combine that with the already red coloured moorland and boom!!! It is party time. The 1st was maybe 20-30 mins after sunrise, it was a strong break of direct light that broke through the clouds behind.

Two was a "on the way home" shot. I had ventured up the Glen but to no avail...grey misery....you know what it is like. No amount of processing would ever get two to the level of one.
 
SFTPhotography said:
They're over 2 hours apart. The light in the first was really intense, combine that with the already red coloured moorland and boom!!! It is party time. The 1st was maybe 20-30 mins after sunrise, it was a strong break of direct light that broke through the clouds behind.

Two was a "on the way home" shot. I had ventured up the Glen but to no avail...grey misery....you know what it is like. No amount of processing would ever get two to the level of one.
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Steve, I'll be quite honest with you here ( I know you can take it....). I can't see any reason why No 2 here could look much more punchy, rather like No 1.

It's down to you, of course but if No 2 were mine I'd aiming for a file that looked like No 2.
 
jerry12953 said:
Steve, I'll be quite honest with you here ( I know you can take it....). I can't see any reason why No 2 here could look much more punchy, rather like No 1.

It's down to you, of course but if No 2 were mine I'd aiming for a file that looked like No 2.
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With 2 - you have a huge area of middle ground in shadow, not in the blacks, just nasty shadow - or more accurately an area of dull low mid tones. If you look at the RGB histogram for the shot - it is spread right the way across the frame (naturally no blocked areas and none clipped in the luminance chart). If you go to 100% preview you'll see all sorts of lovely detail on the left most near most outcrop. Increase contrast, or blacks and you'll kill it.

With one, you do have a few area's of 100% black, and that is quite natural in a high contrast scene with deep shadows and intense light. All I had to do with 1 processing wise is actually decrease the blacks, pull out the mid tones (brightness) as the exposure was done to avoid any clipped whites in the sky and not to lose the colour in the distant bright shore. I always bring the blue white value in a bit and set the 25% input and output values the same.

2 really just needed the shadow area's pulled out so they weren't so muddy as they were in the exposure.

In both shots the saturation was increased and the luminance values of the yellows and red also increased.
 
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SFTPhotography said:
2 really just needed the shadow area's pulled out so they weren't so muddy as they were in the exposure.
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I don't know if that will help at all. Sometimes you just have to keep shadows dark. What I would really like here is to use much broader tonal range of histogram for all the highlight parts. They are very compressed and appear rather flat. You have no 1 anyway, so there is no real need to use this shot at all.
 
LongLensPhotography said:
I don't know if that will help at all. Sometimes you just have to keep shadows dark. What I would really like here is to use much broader tonal range of histogram for all the highlight parts. They are very compressed and appear rather flat. You have no 1 anyway, so there is no real need to use this shot at all.
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Local adjustment to the mountain side.... the sky, and the lightest most point of the sky is where you'd want it to be. I can play with the mountainside more...

But as you say it is and was all about one. 2 is more of a stop the car on the way home after the main event. If I just drove on it wouldn't matter
 
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