1 photo & a request for suggestions or critiques

[qnr]

If this was your photograph, how would you improve it? Would you modify the colors any (these are pretty much as seen, with a slight bump up in contrast & nudging down in saturation - also with a tiny color curve adjustment). Would you lighten it overall? Lighten/darken only the jetty? (I'm trying to keep the birds in silhouette and figured the jetty should also be in near silhoutte, though it's possible to change the levels in only that area). What other changes/corrections would you make if it was yours? Thanks! Incidentally, I might not respond immediately, I'm going to be away from the computer for most of the day.

The Jetty Set
The Packery Channel jetty at sunrise, with a Great Blue Heron and two Brown Pelicans.

Edit: s/!/1/ in subject line

[NV Whino]

1. Is what I would do

I would select the jetty, and keep it as is. Then I would inverse that selection and increase the saturation and contrast. That would bump the color and enhance your silhouettes.

[qnr]

2. OK, thanks. I'll play with that and see what it looks like. Actually, I had bumped up

the colors a bit, and it looked nice, but it also looked 'artificial' to me, since I knew what the colors actually looked like. But I'll play and see if I can find a nice middle ground, thanks!

[NV Whino]

3. bumping the saturation is tricky

I just played with one of mine. I bumped the saturation and vibrance, and then had to back off. But it's still a little more saturated than the original, and I like it.

[qnr]

8. Yes - I tend to be very moderate with bumping saturation, I'm much more likely

to de-saturate by a tiny amount, generally, if I've upped the contrast.

[ManiacJoe]

4. Playing around with whole-picture adjustments,

I ended up doing the following in Paint.net:

Increase the sat by 5
Increase the brightness and contrast (2, 4)
Added some USM (110, radius 1, threshold 4)

This had the effects of:
Adding a little more color to the sky, rocks, and water.
Slightly darkened the silhouettes.
Brought out some more detail in the rocks and waves; cleaned up the railing.

With something like PSP or Photoshop, masks could be used to isolate some of the changes.

Excellent photo to start with! It really does not need much work, just a few minor tweaks.

[qnr]

9. Thanks - I'll play around with your settings later, using Bibble & GIMP. n/t

[sandnsea]

5. Add deep blue photo filter

To soften the kind of too bright sunset without losing color, bring out the water more, without losing the shadowing you want.

[qnr]

11. Thanks - well, I didn't really want to /change/ the sunrise, as it was pretty much as

shot, but everyone wanted the saturation upped, so that ended up darkening it anyway. I compared a few versions, some with the details of the jetty visible, and some with it bordering on, but not quite being a silhouette, I ended up preferring the darker version of the jetty.

[Mz Pip]

6. I like the other suggestions

of turning up the saturation a bit, particuarly in the sky.

I would also crop an inch off the top and an inch off the bottom.

[qnr]

10. OK, thanks - I've bowed to the demand and upped the saturation, I've also cropped

a bit off the top and bottom.

[qnr]

7. OK - here's the way I modified it (I'll respond to everyone's comments and suggestions

eventually, I had a rough day and I'm sleep-typing (probably sleep-typoing too).

First, I tend to de-saturate a little when I increase contrast. However, the question was, "what would you do" and the almost unanimous consensus was that the saturation should be upped, so I did that.

I didn't follow all the points. Basically, I used Qtpfsgui to make an HDR from the .orf (the Olympus RAW format). My HDRs tend to be understated, as a rule, just for general info. I then used the Gimp to up the saturation and contrast a bit, and to run another unsharp mask (I'd already done some minor USM using Bibble/Noise Ninja in the first version) - I did have the jetty at the original levels, but upon comparison, I preferred the darker version. I then put the photo back in to Bibble to crop and add metadata (could just as easily have cropped in the Gimp of course).

It's a smaller version, since it's a link to where you can view in the original size if you wanted to.

[Celebration]

13. I like your edits

But I also liked the original picture.

:shrug:

I actually like the water in there as a contrast to all the red.

[qnr]

14. Thanks - I can appreciate what people are trying to do with the photo, as far

as the color goes, but if I, personally, had to choose between the two strictly on the basis of color, I'd go for the original.

[dbmk]

12. In a perfect world..

I would shoot the bird on the right out of the sky and crop the picture (and the bird on the left) so the sun and heron ends up in the lower right rule-of-thirds crosspoint. :)
Getting rid of the most of the jetty in the process. Sky is fantastic - jetty not so much(if you ask me :) and the water particularly not). But the bird on the right gets to live this time around.

That move depends highly on the size of your original and purpose of the final image though - in terms of quality.

Essentially crop it from a little right of the rightmost bird, from the (what seems to be a) path and up. Over to about halfway between the two other birds. And all the way up.

A simpler crop would be crop out from the top right corner and out - taking at least some of the water out of the picture. Move focus up on the sky.

[qnr]

15. Thank goodness the bird gets to live :) - thanks, I'll play around with your

suggestions, just to see what comes out. There is no 'purpose' the the final image, this was mostly an experiment to see how different people looked at the same photo. Obviously, I'm in a definite minority position in regards to some things, but that was the whole point.