vla Posted March 11, 2009 Share #1 Posted March 11, 2009 (edited) Advertisement (gone after registration) good evening everybody, remember stuart's shot of playboy enterprises. it's a great photograph - my only suggestion was to add some light to the foreground. stuart sent me his file, i spent some time with it and here are the results - #1 - the original image - beautiful ... can it be improved? #2 - a first quick & dirty test - added some light to the right hand side of building #1, left the rest of the image unchanged. the result? well ... there is some noise hidden in the dark foreground of image, which now becomes visible. other than that - i might stop here ... #3 - i was curious whether noise reduction and subsequent resharpening can help. in addition, i increased color saturation and contrast on the playboy building and the skscraper in the back. doesn't convince me ... #4 - b&w - stuart's picture has beautiful colors. exactly for that reason i was curious how it would look in b&w. did the conversion and added a moderate yellow filter to enhance the playboy building the question now becomes - are these really improvements or merely modifactions of the original pic? or does post processing even make things worse? it's up to you to judge, looking forward to your comments ... markus Edited March 11, 2009 by vla Quote Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advertisement Posted March 11, 2009 Posted March 11, 2009 Hi vla, Take a look here Finetuning Playboy Enterprises. I'm sure you'll find what you were looking for!
thompsonkirk Posted March 12, 2009 Share #2 Posted March 12, 2009 Hi, Markus - I'm really pleased to see you taking such careful interest, in this & other posts, in other people's work. You're giving us helpful examples of constructive criticism. Kirk Quote Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
stuny Posted March 12, 2009 Share #3 Posted March 12, 2009 Markus - Thank you for your very instructive and creative work on these. I like your first two modifications best (the one with the lighter front building wins to my eye), and the B&W is lovely, but not as dramatic as the color. The only step backwards, I believe, is the last color one, in which the noise reduction removes the sharp clarity. I feel sharp clarity is an important facet to the composition. Thank you again for your time and work on these. Quote Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
shutterhack Posted March 13, 2009 Share #4 Posted March 13, 2009 I don't mind losing minimal shadow detail like in the top left, and I surely like the extra crispness Quote Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
vla Posted March 14, 2009 Author Share #5 Posted March 14, 2009 kirk, stuart and fadzly, :) - many thanks for your comments, i'm very happy to get such positive feedback on my contributions, especially since i am still relatively new to this forum. on post processing - i do agree with you guys that less often is better than more. one could now have an interesting discussion on the relevance of photographic skills vs. software capabilities in digital photograhpy. sometimes i have the impression that powerful image-processing software can turn any picture into something aesthetically interesting, regardless of the quality of the underlying photography. maybe this is true under certain conditions. but it seems to me that in many real-world situations traditional photographic skills still are most relevant. to me this is very comforting - i have much more fun being out there taking pictures than sitting in front of my computer and doing post processing. on this forum - i have a lot of fun surfing this forum, but i also consider it a learning space to improve my skills as a photographer. writing a short analysis of a picture and giving some suggestions for improvement is a good learning experience in itself and hopefully relevant for my fellow photograhper. and it can be done in a couple of minutes. the more effort we put into constructively reviewing our pictures, the more we will learn from each other ... btw, is this an entirely virtual forum or do some of you guys get together from time to time? cheers, markus Quote Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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