Ch 50, confused, works in progress

ginger_55

I am really confused on this thing. Does anyone know the color of a sunset? What fits the challenge, what people like, etc???????????????? I left the dogs here and went to take a photo of the sunset today. There were low clouds which made the sunset different than the other day, every time I go out to photograph nature it is different, so many variables.

ginger_55

GREAPER

More good stuff Ginger.

You really seem to be getting nice stuff lately. Congrats.

For the challenge, I think I like the impressionist flowers better, but who knows. Not me.

behr655

All nice shots Ginger and they have nice colors.


Bear

ginger_55

I am going with this one, thanks so much Greaper and Behr
I was finally happy myself when I saw this one. I treated it like a baby in PS, did very little to it. Now, I can relax on this score. I have a self assignment to find the shrimp fisher people (the common man in small boats), hopefully, and I want to get to a place called ACE Basin for migrating birds.

I do want to say that I put a lot of time and work into this shot. Not that that means it should win, place or show. But I did put in my dues. It was easy in photoshop. Getting here took a little over a week of constant work and thinking.

Smile, ginger

Next morning: I just checked the gamut warning and worked up the one below, no gamut warning, as opposed to the brighter one, but w gamut warning. ????

And I remember the scene as redder, like the top one, but I am not sure of anything as remembered...........

ginger_55

This is how the shot was when I brought it up from RAW, so you can see that it is just a work up, a bit of curves, saturation, LAB sharpening, and it was good to go. Oh, I straightened the horizon a bit and removed a few dust spots.

It would be easy to think that the sunrise photo was a product of photoshop, but it really is not, not in my opinion. In fact, it could have been entered in a non photoshop challenge. If one thing was not allowed, another thing would be.

ginger:D

Sandy

Magnificent, for me it is #4 and #6, you always come through, good job G.

rutt

All beautiful sunsets, Ginger. And great post.

Hmm, let me put on my Dan Margulis hat for a minute and dispense some theory. Sunsets are truly impossible colors for either prints or computer monitors to reproduce. The colored sun is the brightest part of the shot, and it is so bright it almost hurts your eyes. For prints, the brightest you can get is to put no ink at all on the paper. This doesn't make it as bright as the sun, and anyway then it would be white. If it were a different color paper it would be even less bright. Computer monitors are better this way, but still way less bright than the sun, even at sunset. And again, the brightest they can get is white, all three guns, red, green, and blue, turned up all the way. So they can't be both bright as possible and yellow (or red or whatever.)

The point is that you cannot be accurate in your portrayal of a sunset. You have to rely on optical/psychological tricks. You have to fool your viewer into "seeing" what you saw, in his/her mind's eye, because you cannot actually put it there in front of him/her.

Dan's trick for this is to work in LAB and get the brightest part of the image to to have a very positive L value and also very postive A and B values. This is an impossible color, but PS has to represent it and so makes some compromises to do so. The advantage of working this way is that you can make the L curve very steep as it grades from the impossible hot colors in the middle of the sun to the darker colors surrounding it. The result is very believable shading.

Still that's only one way to skin this particular cat. As I said above, your shots and post are working here. And since reproducing reality here is impossible, you are free to use your fine artistic eye to express the experience you had when you saw this in person. Think of the "reality" of Vincent Von Gough's suns. Or Turner's skys.