Maine coast lighthouse

[SteveF]

Hello,

Looking for some thoughts here.

The foreground is pretty much straight out of the camera.

The sky was fairly bland - I've spent some time with Viveza and PS trying to liven it up.

But after looking at an image too long it is easy to lose track what is ok and what is not.

As well, I'm open to other thoughts concerning the qualities of the B&W conversion, composition, whether I just just toss it in the trash, etc.

http://www.efines.net/images/fm/Fines_20091009_0169_bw_web.jpg

[moose135]

I'm liking what I see, Steve. You did a nice job on the sky. If anything, I might bump the contrast, especially on the rocks, to help bring them out a little more. To me, it looks a little flat.

[adbsgicom]

Just playing with the greypoint on levels and the contrast on curves you can shift from something rather dark and ominous to a pretty bright scene. This version is kinda stuck in the middle. I definately think you have some good source material here.

28878

I'm by no stretch a guru a b/w conversion, just showing the result of pushing the whitepoint down until the clouds just begin to clamp, pushing the black point up a bit (losing some detail in the lower left), shifted the grey point to .91 brightening up the rocks and set the contrast on the curves dialog to a moderate contrast. Image is already deleted on my PC....

[craig_d]

My biggest problem with this picture is that after reading the title "Maine coast lighthouse", my first reaction to the image was, "What lighthouse?... Oh, there it is." The lighthouse kind of gets lost; it doesn't stand out against the rocks or the sky, and it's partially obscured by the trees to either side of it as well. I don't think Andrew's version does anything to change that; if anything, the glaring clouds and contrast-enhanced rock textures call even more attention to themselves.

[Carmelo75]

I liked the picture as well, independently of the title (I personally hate to give titles to pictures, they can be misleading...). Wat is also true is that, as it is, it lacks contrast and does not give enough relevance to the different textures (sky, stones and trees in particular). Concerning the composition, while it is true that the lighthouse is not very prominent, I think that it would not have provided a very interesting subject by itself. For me, the points of interest are the sky and the stones, and those are well balanced.

Just for fun I also did a quick editing of the original picture, but I opted for masking the three main regions (sky, stones and trees, as mentioned above) and playing with levels/curves independently (in fact, I left the trees as they are). This is probably very close to what would have been done in an old-fashioned dark room...

Here is my result, you can take it as a starting point if you like it...

EDIT: deleted the image as well...

Carmelo