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Euston Tower from Eversholt Street


biglouis

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Louis

 

I like this shot very much, especially pink colours.

 

I've been attracted to skies lately but find that I get either foreground detail (eg buildings) and bleached out sky, or a good approximation of the sky I see and foreground too under-exposed. Any tips on getting a good compromise by camera controls only - I've had a D-Lux 2 since March.

 

Thanks

 

Steve

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Steve

 

I know exactly what you mean about the issues of exposure between sky and subect and I am still at the enthusiastic novice level myself. Bear in mind I have artificially created the tones in this picture by processing the original colour shot in Lightroom (which I can heartily recommend). By converting to a greyscale and then adjusting the split tone I have been able to increase the exposure of the sky while maintaining the exposure and contrast of the buildings. I find this a lot more difficult to do with colour shots and I'm sure someone here with a lot more experience could explain why.

 

I only took up photography again as a hobby because I am an experience PC user and have been using graphic packages for years for web images, so I have a slight advantage.

 

LouisB

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Louis

 

You had me there!

 

I remember now reading about how to overcome the problem by taking two exposures - one for sky and one for foreground - and then editing them into one in Photoshop. Trouble is, I'm slow to learn, lazy and much prefer taking pictures to processing them.

 

What are the main things you prefer about Lightroom over Photoshop?

 

Steve

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Steve

 

Truth is that I like them both but for different things. My workflow generally tends to be to open all my images in Lightroom. I mainly shoot RAW on my D-LUX because (maybe I am wrong here, btw) I assume that I can always overcome exposure or lighting issues from a RAW file more easily than a JPEG. I also assume I am getting more information without compression or noise reduction shooting RAW.

 

I'll often try to get the desired effect in Lightroom which I achieve about 40% of the time.

 

Whether I am happy or not I will take my partially or fully developed file into PS and then either alter the image size to something more acceptable and save it as JPEG, also converting to sRGB, or I will quite often do further image adjustments - perhaps sharpening or unsharpening - before I complete the picture. I also have some useful add-ins in PS, such as Noise Ninja which I actually use pretty sparingly as it can often soften the picture too much while removing noise.

 

I've yet to download the new Lightroom Beta 4 so I don't know how much further Lightroom has improved.

 

Hope my description is of interest. Like you I am learning as I go and no doubt making all sorts of mistakes on the way.

 

Louis

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Louis

 

Your description is certainly of interest. Myself I'm still finding my way around the camera and the peripheral stuff.

 

I've stayed away from RAW so far, put off by the big file sizes, yet shoot in high quality jpeg which is also starting to clog my hard drive - do you have external storage? Haven't managed to calibrate my monitor (I work on a laptop) and prints consequently(?) appear underexposed.

 

When it comes to photoshop, I twiddle the levels but can't decide whether what I see is an improvement or not.

 

I was always disappointed with film photography, getting the prints back and not recognising what I saw against the memory of what I took. The D-Lux 2 is great with so many options, I'm really enjoying it.

 

Cheers

 

Steve

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last attempt at trying to render the picture the way I saw it when I took it. The low afternoon sunlight made Euston Tower almost fluoresce against the sky seen through a canyon caused by the positioning of the buildings in the foreground. This time I used the history brush to go back and add the original colour to the desaturated original.

 

[ATTACH]10342[/ATTACH]

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