Need help with farm landscapes

Kinkajou

I am having a terrible time with these shots... I just don't know how to process them well as this is not my normal genre. I shot these with a polarizer and have only taken them into Lightroom so far. I want them to have a happy farm feeling and show the freshness of new veggies growing, but I feel like the contrast and saturation is too high in many areas but about right (definitely not perfect) in a couple spots... but if I bring up the darks in some areas, it has an adverse effect on different areas, so what I've got at this point is the closest I could get to a 'happy medium', although it's really not that happy... I do understand that the harsh mid-day sun is a problem and that under cloudy sky, some of these issues may resolve themselves.

Is there a good way to work on something like this without creating a whole bunch of layer masks and working each section individually? If you would like to play with the pictures and repost to illustrate a point, I am fine with that.


Before


After


Weirdness in the tree line (among other places) here:


Slightly different processing, but still looking off and kinda flat:


I have shot after shot that just looks wrong. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your help!

ront

I think time of day would help to make a huge difference!

Ron

TreyHoff

Polarizers, used to saturate the greens, are only effective when use approx. 90 degrees way from the sun. I would also compose more of the frame on the crops and less sky...angle your camera downward to capture more of the crops. Yes, shooting early morning or one hour before sunset would really help with the colors. Good subject matter worth reshooting. Try shooting some close-ups of the crops to really tell the story of what crops they are. You'll be successful with the tip you get here on this forum. Thanks for sharing.

Kinkajou

Thanks for the thoughts, guys! I knew that the time of day would be a problem, but that's when they were having the picnic, so that's when I was there. I do have several more 'intimate' shots with the plants and people at the picnic, but I would also like to have a few wider images that show the farm as a whole. Maybe my composition could be improved, though... I won't deny that.

TreyHoff, could you give me a little more info on what you meant by having the polarizer 90 degrees to the sun and how I determine whether I've reached that point? I simply adjusted the polarizer to the point at which there was not too much reflection on the leaves of the plants and the sky was a nice, dark blue. I would love to learn if there is more to it than that.

Still, however, I would like to ask if there are any pointers to processing the types of photos that I already have so that I can get the most out of them. I know the farm would let me go back and shoot anytime, but as these were taken during an event, they would like to see what I got during the day (no, it was not a paid gig). Also, even though these are landscape-y shots, I'm having some similar issues in a couple of the other shots as well... all with the polarizer... noticing a theme here...

Thanks!

schmoo

+2 on what's been said. The main things working against this shoot is your angle to the sun and the time of day that you're shooting.

I think these could still be pretty good if you had the ability to shoot them in IR. Then you would want to be doing this midday and the green leaves would really pop off the ground.

Would it be possible to give it an IR look in post? I know they make IR-style actions in different programs, so maybe that's worth looking into if you can't do it manually!

I hope you don't mind but here's a screen grab of one possibility. It took less than 30 seconds in PS playing with the default b/w sliders. Hope this gives you some ideas!