[morlandroger]

Taken as the sun disappeared in the grey. With a good imagination you can just make out the IOM on the horizon. Tried to reduce the highlight on the bottom left but not great success. Advice and C&C as always welcome.
Thanks for looking
Roger

[rivanprincess]

In my opinion a bit less sky would give this a more dramatic look and focus the eye on the harbour.

Love the colours and lighting

[AQ]

I agree about the sky but you will have to be careful not to get the horizon in the centre. Perhaps a very tight crop leaving the horizon 1/3 way down ??. I have just realised that scrolling the picture up and down on the Pixalo page is an easy way to see the different options.

[Dave Canon]

It is a nice picture and I agree with the comments on cropping. One of the challenges of this type of shot is that the dynamic range (lightest to darkest) is very large. This is where HDR (High Dynamic Range) techniques are useful. Of course you would need to do this at the taking stage so that will have to be next time.

While specular highlights are OK, the one light and its reflection are burnt right to white. You can probably repair this by cloning some of the surrounding light. If you try this, clone into a new layer and set the opacity very low (less than 5%); I would probably start with 3%. You need a soft brush and to very carefully cover the white but still keep it very light. If you overdo it, you can reduce the opacity of the new layer which is one of the advantages of cloning to a separate layer. It is such a good shot I think it is well worth this small repair and some cropping.

[Rob Barron]

All has pretty much been said here Roger. Suffice to say i agree that the sky could be cropped a fair bit and the image made into a panoramic scene. Bear in mind that although the burn tool reduces things down nicely, when used with pure burnt out white it just looks like a grey blur so is often not very effective. On the original light above the harbour wall, we can see that clearly here, better to clone into it rather than use the burn tool IMO.

I do get the feeling this shot was taken just a couple of minutes too late. The orange line along the horizon suggests there was a good sunset there but we are not seeing any of that. Funnily enough, you could lift the sky more by using the Burn tool on that and lifting the contrast so that it has a moodier feel to it. Not too much, keep it sensible but just give it a bit more impact.

The scene is a very good one and even with a couple of weak points, this is still a very pleasant capture.

Cheers,
Rob

[morlandroger]

Thanks all,
Will have a try again. This actually is an HDR image 3 shot 2 stops auto bracket, went easy on the processing.
Rob I have another 25 shots to work through most earlier two later. The only sun I saw was sadly a slit of orange. Wil put some more up later if possible. I will put up the originals too.
Roger

[Rob Barron]

Look forward to seeing those Roger. I know what you mean about the slit of orange. With heavy cloud cover, the only time we see anything of the sun is often when part of it is able to show through the horizon because of the low angle.

Keep on pushing those boundaries, it's interesting to see what you're producing

Cheers,
Rob

[morlandroger]

Had another go at this. Much tighter crop, adjusted levels in sky and another go at reducing worst of highlights.


The uncropped version can be found here. Attractive carpark.
http://www.pixalo.com/gallery/showphoto.php/photo/18574

Thanks to all.
PS now you can see the IOM

[Rob Barron]

I'm afraid at this size, the elements in the image are just too small to be effective. The original has lighter areas above and below and they balance the darker mid-section but here it is all a bit too dark at this size. Not a problem when a lot bigger but the ratio of width to height here is just a touch too great. It's roughly 5:1 whereas the generally common ratio for a letterbox panorama is about 5:2 (10:4).

It is highly likely that if this is printed out larger, it is a lot more effective, I am only going by what it looks like here.

It's a real shame that darned carpark is where it is. That shoreline provides a great lead line taking us up to the harbour. If the dark area in the left foreground was there instead of that car park, the overall shot would be a winner. None of that is your fault, you can't rebuild the landscape just for a photo LOL.

Cheers,
Rob