Critique Tranquillity on a mountain summit

Steven001

Steven001

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Steven
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I took this image last night on a wild camp on the summit of Beinn a'Chrulaiste. It was a beautiful night but as usual I have no confidence in my work and I'm unsure of the final result. I would appreciate any C+C on how I could improve this. Is it too dark or is that just my screen?



Peace by Steven Fergus, on Flickr
 
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Nowt wrong with that IMO. Seems to represent your scene pretty accurately (even though I wasn't there ;) )
 
It's a great shot and one I would have been happy to have taken. You have edit my images set to yes so I hope you don't mind, here is what a little tweak to the shadows and mid tones would look like;

stevenfergus by Craig Hollis, on Flickr
 
I found you again haha! (I've posted on some of your other threads about your trip to Glencoe). @Steven001 I think your edit is nicer and looks perfectly fine on my screen with the exception of the sun being bright but that's it's job eh? haha. My screens just been calibrated today if that gives you any boost in confidence :).
 
YoshiK1 said:
I found you again haha! (I've posted on some of your other threads about your trip to Glencoe). @Steven001 I think your edit is nicer and looks perfectly fine on my screen with the exception of the sun being bright but that's it's job eh? haha. My screens just been calibrated today if that gives you any boost in confidence :).
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What luminance have you set it to? Mine is on the dark side at 100 which has been bang on for prints not coming out too dark.

However getting into summer when the room I work in is brighter I feel like I need to up the brightness a bit to match iPad iPhone other device screens better although this goes against the grain of a calibrated workflow in some respects as my prints match at the moment.

Regarding the edit no artistic choices were applied. I simply put it up there for @Steven001 's benefit to see if he liked the foreground brighter.
 
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Craig_85 said:
It's a great shot and one I would have been happy to have taken. You have edit my images set to yes so I hope you don't mind, here is what a little tweak to the shadows and mid tones would look like;

stevenfergus by Craig Hollis, on Flickr
Click to expand...

I don't mind at all Craig, I actually really like that edit. I'm always wary about lifting the shadows too much in fear of making it look artificial, but I think you've got it pretty much spot on. Did you use Lightroom to lift the shadows or a curve adjustment in Photoshop?

YoshiK1 said:
I found you again haha! (I've posted on some of your other threads about your trip to Glencoe). @Steven001 I think your edit is nicer and looks perfectly fine on my screen with the exception of the sun being bright but that's it's job eh? haha. My screens just been calibrated today if that gives you any boost in confidence :).
Click to expand...

I'll pop over to the other thread after this :) Thanks for the comments! Is there an idiots guide on how to calibrate your screen? I could probably do with getting mine done.
 
WingTsun said:
I like this a lot. I think your original captures the light best as the light is as you'd expect it to be at that time of the day. Great shot!
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Are you viewing on a calibrated monitor?

I really assess the dynamic range of my eyesight a lot. It is a very difficult thing to accurately put into a photograph don't you find?

If you look towards a bright light source then the shadows in your peripheral vision do lose detail easily to the level in the original. If you moved your eyes to look at just the shadows for a few moments though your iris would open and you would start to make out more detail like the edit I offered up.

What is hard is to simulate in a wide photo that takes in bright and dark areas, which is viewed in one hit, what you would see actually looking at the scene. With your eyes you have a relatively narrow field of vision moving around the scene with a constantly changing 'aperture' to make up a series of memories to give an overall picture in our head of what we are looking at.

Photos and reality are never going to be the same. Our impression of what is accurate I think is also marred by what is produced straight out of camera and either being afraid, or making errors, when deviating from that.

Try and keep it believable but process things how you like the look of them is my advice.
 
Steven001 said:
I don't mind at all Craig, I actually really like that edit. I'm always wary about lifting the shadows too much in fear of making it look artificial, but I think you've got it pretty much spot on. Did you use Lightroom to lift the shadows or a curve adjustment in Photoshop?



I'll pop over to the other thread after this :) Thanks for the comments! Is there an idiots guide on how to calibrate your screen? I could probably do with getting mine done.
Click to expand...

In basic terms I used curves in Photoshop to protect the highlights.
 
Craig_85 said:
Are you viewing on a calibrated monitor?

I really assess the dynamic range of my eyesight a lot. It is a very difficult thing to accurately put into a photograph don't you find?

If you look towards a bright light source then the shadows in your peripheral vision do lose detail easily to the level in the original. If you moved your eyes to look at just the shadows for a few moments though your iris would open and you would start to make out more detail like the edit I offered up.

What is hard is to simulate in a wide photo that takes in bright and dark areas, which is viewed in one hit, what you would see actually looking at the scene. With your eyes you have a relatively narrow field of vision moving around the scene with a constantly changing 'aperture' to make up a series of memories to give an overall picture in our head of what we are looking at.

Photos and reality are never going to be the same. Our impression of what is accurate I think is also marred by what is produced straight out of camera and either being afraid, or making errors, when deviating from that.

Try and keep it believable but process things how you like the look of them is my advice.
Click to expand...

Yes, I'm on a calibrated MAC cinema screen. Agreed, it's very difficult and even with calibrated screens, they all show something slightly different.
 
@Craig_85 - pass on the luminance. I got them tools that do the jiggery-pokery for me. There was options I set before I started it which was the white balance and brightness but I can't remember the setting I selected. I never calibrated the monitor manually it was using a Spyder5 pro which I only used last night for the first time.

@Steven001 - on Mac you can go into settings and then display and you can select to calibrate it. It takes you through loads of options but it was a headache for me and I didn't know if I could trust the colours etc. I bought a Datacolour Spyder5 Pro and noticed an instant difference when it was calibrated using that tool. I'm using a late 2011 MacBook Pro without retina and had never calibrated it properly before so I might see the change more than others with newer monitors.
 
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