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Way to have your camera ready at just the right moment. It’s evident that you were thinking about “composition” when you snapped this; all to often I zoom in on the spontaneous subject, snap a million shots and forget about how those subjects actually play a role in the surrounding scene.
There is an imbalance of heavy elements on the right side of the picture: the sun, the geese flying over, the open barn window. Even though there are two gabled windows and cupolas to balance each other out, they don’t help to balance out the other elements. I would have tried either going vertical, zoomed in to only include the top of the barn, or snapped the shot when the birds were further to the left, directly in between the cupolas.
The HDR effect was performed well. Hard to tell how it was done. However, the sky is just too dark (or perhaps the barn is too light) to look natural enough for my liking.
Thanks.
No HDR. Just a graduated filter dropped down across the sky. I exposed for the highlights had to boost exposure in post and pull down the filter. I agree it needs help but I’m not sure how to improve it unless I spent a lot of time with a brush.
I don’t have PS. Just LR.
I see, that’s why it’s such a smooth transition. Filters are very helpful.
Perhaps not too much time would have to be spent with a brush in LR if you used the Masking feature along the top of the barn. However, it would be very difficult to make the entire roof the same brightness value from top to bottom using the brush, because the current gradient is so smooth. Maybe darken slightly the bottom half of the roof? That might cut the initial impression that there’s a gradient over the entire picture . . .
Do you usually increase the clarity on your images? I have noticed that a lot of them are beautifully sharp
It depends entirely on the image. Clouds and sky usually benefit from adding clarity. I usually sharpen to +70 and use clarity sparingly. Be careful though. I shoot RAW. If you shoot jpeg your camera already adds sharpening when it processes the file.
This is much better than playing with the contrast which I hardly ever touch. For portraits I often reduce clarity to minus 10-20 to soften skin. If you go too negative with clarity the person starts to look like an alien. More clarity, particularly for senior men can give a very interesting effect.
As far as sharp images go. You have to start out with great glass. My favorite is my Nikon 28-70 2.8. It’s on my camera body 90‰ of the time.
This is much better than playing with the contrast which I hardly ever touch.
Same here! There are several ways of adding contrast besides the ‘contrast’ slider, and since the other ways let you control exactly how to apply it, why use a ‘magic’ slider which just does what it wants to do? You can lower the ‘black’ slider and raise the ‘whites’ slider to add more contrast, or you can use the ‘tone curve’ panel for basically the same thing.
Ditto on being careful with the “clarity” slider, it can really do more damage than good if not used properly. I personally am not a fan of the ‘grungy’ look which it creates at high levels.
As far as sharp images go. You have to start out with great glass.
That should printed and hung up on the wall somewhere! No matter how good your camera and computer are, they can’t make a picture “sharp” unless it was already sharp in the first place. Every RAW picture needs sharpening, but unless it’s already decently focused, you aren’t going to get a good sharp picture, no matter how much sharpening you add in post.
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