Brandon1987's Most Recent attempt at Photography - Page 2 - Genesis Forum: GenCoupe Hyundai Genesis Coupe Forums

supercooled · 02-08-2010, 02:57 PM

That would be great, thanks.

They're the ones with the yellow divider lines that stand out in the picture. Would make a great wallpaper.

**Kamkaze** · 02-08-2010, 04:21 PM

Very good pics with a point and shoot. Not much else you can do until you get a DSLR.

Quote:

Originally Posted by brandon1987

Hahaha I don't doubt it. Keep in mind that this is what I am shooting with lol:

Man, I want some money so I can get a DSLR.

She is very photo sensitive, and so very few photos of her exist because of the concern that she could implode at any time if photographed.

I didn't see many people out, let alone women, everybody was inside staying warm getting ready for the Super Bowl.

I'll try a little harder for you next time.

But seriously, other than upgrading my camera, does anyone have any suggestions for improvement?

**Kamkaze** · 02-08-2010, 04:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by supercooled

These roads are impossibly clean. In Ontario, it's all slush.

Do you have the original RAW?

With a point and shoot I highly doubt he can shoot in RAW.

NXXT · 02-08-2010, 05:11 PM

Damn nice pics man, Epic snow shots

**brandon1987** · 02-08-2010, 07:18 PM

Thanks for the compliments guys, and Supercooled, sorry I don't have the unedited version of the pictures anymore. If you want it, here is the full size image.

teknical1ty · 02-08-2010, 11:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by alika86

Nice pics! Damn the mainland really is beautiful in the winter time. I've never been in snow before!

x2. Man I'd kill to be in snow just once in my lifetime. VERY nice pics!

**brandon1987** · 02-09-2010, 05:35 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by teknical1ty

x2. Man I'd kill to be in snow just once in my lifetime. VERY nice pics!

And then you'd die from the cold. haha J/K

Thanks man.

Whaever · 02-09-2010, 04:45 PM

This is what I think of when I see your pic. A warm road cutting through the winter.

Orig (resized to match my edit):

What I did (Not a big difference just some little fixes):
Adjusted the snow to be more white, not grey.
Adjusted midtones to be darker for more detail
Recropped to have the edges of the road hit the corners of the pic.
Fixed Horizon, only slightly off, and put it about the one the 1/3 lines.
Sharpened the closer trees a bit.

Probably would have looked better if it wasn't and edit of an edit.

Booo quality dropped. It's softer than it's supposed to be.

**FlesHBoX** · 02-10-2010, 01:54 PM

I am not doing every shot, only the ones that really stood out at me. My favorite of the bunch is definitely #2! This was an overall very excellent shot that was well composed and well edited in post.

I like this shot, generally speaking, however it tends to not "pop"

This shot is very similar to the one above, however this one definitely "pops" I love that the vanishing lines draw the eye across the canvas rather than straight up the middle.
Also, the slightly higher contrast definitely serves this image well in that the orange of the divider line is much more prominent, creating a nice (not to reuse the word...) contrast against the otherwise flat pallet.
I also feel that the lack of the car in the distance helps. This may just be personal preference, however the tiny headlamps in the first shot seem distracting.

I think that this shot has tremendous potential in post production (though could have been straight from the camera as well) The treeline on the right, going into the distance, along with the fence in the foreground serve as both an excellent framing device as well as subject.
My only critique would be to pull up the exposure some and possibly add a bit of extra contrast to really bring out the details.

Nice angle, good DOF. The extreme dynamic range of a shot like this is a prime example of where a technique such as multi-exposure HDR could really shine. It would be nice to have the sky highlights not blown out, and yet have the lost shadow details in the nose of the car be visible as well.

Not really something that can be just done on the fly of course, it would require having a plan and bringing a tripod.

I really like the high contrast look of this one. It reminds me somewhat of the lush winter shots of Adams to an extent. Unfortunately the highlights are blown out here, this is, of course an unfortunate side effect of fully automatic settings.
I would love to see this with more of the highlight detail preserved, though I doubt it would be possible to pull them back in post at this extreme level of contrast. Unless maybe this is an edited version, in that case, increasing the contrast of the stump and leaving the background contrast lower using a mask would be beneficial to the overall effect.

Unlike the road shot above that I commented about the "stright up the middle" as a negative, in this instance, with the converging lines of the guy wires and the texture lines of the chain link rails, I like this shot.
It looks to me like there is some blue-ish/green-ish color to the rails, and I think that bringing out this coloration with some saturation could really make this stand out. Maybe even using a selective mask to maintain the "middle grey" of the background.
I love that the rails are not perfectly straight, the irregular aspect of the rails really leds to the feel and mood.

**brandon1987** · 02-10-2010, 02:40 PM

Cool, thanks for the critiques Jesse! I might try and see if I can implement some of your suggestion tonight (without ruining them by editing an edit).

Thanks to you too Neal! I did check out the picture last night and forgot to post about it. From my iPod, it looked great!

Gen2.0GT · 02-10-2010, 06:01 PM

lol the first 2 pics reminds me of Silent Hill the game!!! lol nice pics!!!

**FlesHBoX** · 02-11-2010, 06:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by brandon1987

Cool, thanks for the critiques Jesse! I might try and see if I can implement some of your suggestion tonight (without ruining them by editing an edit).

Thanks to you too Neal! I did check out the picture last night and forgot to post about it. From my iPod, it looked great!

sweet, I can't wait to see the results. It is so amazing just how much difference some minor tweaks in photoshop can make to an image.

GenCoupe77 · 02-11-2010, 07:06 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Whaever

This is what I think of when I see your pic. A warm road cutting through the winter.

Orig (resized to match my edit):

What I did (Not a big difference just some little fixes):
Adjusted the snow to be more white, not grey.
Adjusted midtones to be darker for more detail
Recropped to have the edges of the road hit the corners of the pic.
Fixed Horizon, only slightly off, and put it about the one the 1/3 lines.
Sharpened the closer trees a bit.

Probably would have looked better if it wasn't and edit of an edit.

Booo quality dropped. It's softer than it's supposed to be.

The original looks better.

GenCoupe77 · 02-11-2010, 07:15 AM

Whaever's version looks too "bluish" and washed out...

Here's my edited version. The color balance is already excellent, all that I did was slightly adjust the levels/contrast/saturation/brightness to make the image really pop. A subtle adjustment is better and no sharpening is needed if you want to keep the photo's "dreamy" look.

Original

My version

Whaever · 02-11-2010, 08:54 AM

Ya mine is more towards the blue hue. I was trying to get a tad more detail out of the tops of the trees and make the snow more white instead of gray-ish. Well, people like different things.

**brandon1987** · 02-11-2010, 05:29 PM

Here's what I was able to do with editing the edits. I wasn't able to do anything worthwhile with the stump picture to bring back the detail in the snow, so that one is out, but here we go.

I like how Whaever cropped this shot so I tried to get something similar. Unfortunately in trying to remove some of the grey, and without going too blue, I lost some of the vibrant yellow/orange from the divider lines, but overall I do feel that it is an improvement.

This one came out quite grey still, but I think in this case I like that. A little more of the detail is showing through, and is a little less flat than before.

I played around with some settings to give this a bit of an HDR effect, I tried not to go too crazy with it though as I didn't like what it was doing to the trees in the upper left corner.

With this one I increased the saturation, and played with the colour temperature a bit, and recropped it a bit too. I don't know if this is an improvement on the original or not.

Thoughts?

**FlesHBoX** · 02-12-2010, 09:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by brandon1987

This one came out quite grey still, but I think in this case I like that. A little more of the detail is showing through, and is a little less flat than before.

Yes, that is a ton better! And I agree that it doesn't HAVE to have a perfect white. Comparing the original and this edit you can really feel the scene a lot more. Where the original was more akin to "an interesting snapshot" this edit is more capable of evoking an emotion, memory, etc...

Quote:

I played around with some settings to give this a bit of an HDR effect, I tried not to go too crazy with it though as I didn't like what it was doing to the trees in the upper left corner.

Yeah, that is the unfortunate limit of trying to change things in post. To really make this shot excellent would require a re-shoot.

Quote:

With this one I increased the saturation, and played with the colour temperature a bit, and recropped it a bit too. I don't know if this is an improvement on the original or not.

Agreed, I think that this particular shot would benefit most from the usage of masking to bring out specific details, leaving the flat, grey background as is. Inthe original the bridge tended to meld with the background, making for a rather flat image. With everything brought up it loses focus on the foreground because the background stands out too much.

As for the first, I like the overall color balance of your edit, but I agree that the road doesn't pop as much. Another example of where selective edits and masking can help. You might even try compositing the bolder road in from another shot and adding some layer blending.

It's all about playing with things. I assume you are working in Photoshop? There are a TON of tools in photoshop that you can just play with. experiment with them and see how they work.

**brandon1987** · 02-12-2010, 09:44 AM

Unfortunately, I'm not working in Photoshop, had I been, these edits would have come out much better.

I'm embarrassed to admit that these were all edited using Picnik.com, and so selective masks are not an option for me.

**FlesHBoX** · 02-12-2010, 04:32 PM

ahh, bummer. I'm not saying to steal software.... but yeah... photoshop is awesome!

**Kamkaze** · 02-12-2010, 04:55 PM

Lightroom is better

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