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Hello everyone!
I’m having some trouble with getting this picture of a rock yard to look right…! What are your thoughts? I’ve included the original picture and the one I’ve tried editing.
Thank you for your help!
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Hi, @ephillips!
Nice work! I like the perspective you’ve gotten on this shot. Even though the rocky foreground is busy, for some reason the rocks don’t seem to be a distraction like I would’ve expected, but instead work as a sort of leading line to the beautiful mountains! 🙂 There’s also more rocks on one side than the other, but because you can see more of the green forest/mountain on the other side, I think it really balances it out.
Your second edit definitely ‘pops’ more, but it feels a little warm to me. The original feels a bit cool though, so maybe somewhere in the middle? 😉
There also seems to be a lot of ‘empty’ space in the sky, leaving the bottom half feeling pretty heavy. You could try cropping some of the sky out? Maybe when taking the photo, it would have been a good idea to zoom in a bit more and hone in on the mountain/valley. I think if you crop out some of the sky it’ll feel more balanced, though. I like this shot! 🙂
Hey @ephillips! Really nice shot! I like it for similar reasons to what Caitlin said.
You might find this forum thread helpful, if you haven’t read through it before: Principles of Photo Editing. Some good insights were offered there.
I know how it is when you hit a roadblock in editing and you can’t quite sort out why you don’t like what you’ve got. Sometimes I’ll come back to a photo a couple days later and say, “That’s how I edited it?! Let me try that again!” 🙂
Everyone edits a little differently, but I took a couple minutes to play around with your photo to maybe give you some ideas to go off of. I have attached what I came up with, as well as a screenshot which shows the adjustments I made in Lightroom. I also placed a radial filter on the mountains where I raised the shadows and the whites just a little bit higher than the rest of the photo.
I landed on the crop I did because I thought the rock sticking up on the right side of the photo and the tree on the left provided some visual anchors and framing elements that kept the eye in the photo. Cropped this way, my eye tends to flows easily from the rock to the tree, down into the valley, to the mountains, and back through the photo again.
Hope that helps!
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Thank you, @creative-click-photography & @bennett-family, for your helpful comments! I felt I needed another’s fresh look at the picture!
Lydia, thank you for sharing your edited version of the picture. It’s always fun to see what others come up with!
@ephillips I thought b&w when I saw that picture! It’s nice that there’s lots of textured clouds. Color is great too. There’s not much you can do with editing to make a mid-day shot look less mid-day, unless of course, you want to take it into Photoshop and create a scene that didn’t exit. Well composed wit the diagonal lines going into the center of the frame. I may have tried finding some shape in the pile of rocks in the foreground to act as a foreground anchor.
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