Fresh Eyes New Inspiration: Part II - Curtis Falls

You can see Fresh Eyes New Inspiration: Part I - Landscapes here.

From Part I:

One of the great things about digital photography is that you can process your 'negatives' as many times as you like. You aren't stuck with the one interpretation that you baked in the first time. Likewise, due to the ease of revisiting old images (if you've sorted and stored them correctly), a fresh set of eyes can lead to new inspiration.

I thought in this part I would show the before and after of a specific image, to highlight how a fresh eye on old work can be beneficial. To preface this, I am happy to admit that I am a fan of post-processing, and love to see where I can take an image. Part of this is a geeky fascination with post-processing, and part also due to a desire to get the best piece of art that I can at the end.

Here is the before image:

Looking at this now, I can see how bad a composition it was. The left part of the frame is rubbish. Not least that log just randomly jutting into the image. The first thing I did in processing this this time around was to crop in tighter to remove that stuff. In my defence, when shooting this image, I did actually do some tighter zoomed in crops at the scene. But those couple of images were a little too cropped in for the vision I had now. So the first order of business was to crop out the left side of the frame, and particularly the bottom left. The rest of the image I liked a lot.

Next step was to go to work on the tones and colours to give the scene some pop. There's no real recipe here, other than to broadly increase the contrast and saturation. However, I targetted these to get the image how I wanted. Saturation is one of those things that makes images, but can also break them. Too much saturation looks gaudy and cheap. Trying to get the balance right sometimes is hard. In this case I wanted to particularly target the oranges (orange to orange-yellow, approximately), and not saturate anything else too much. Anyway, here's what I ended up with:

I'm pretty happy with this now. The crop works really well, and the contrast in the scene matches what you expect in a deep rainforest setting.

It is possible to take things further. A reasonably common technique in landscape photography is called the "Orton effect". Essentially it blurs the colour information in the image, to give it deeper colours/saturation and a slightly soft feel. The Orton effect can work really well with long exposure waterfalls as it accentuates the silky look of the falls and the water. Here's the image with a bit of an Orton effect. I like it, but it could be argued it's taken the post processing too far. But in art, I don't believe there is such things as "too far". It's really whether the image strikes a chord with you or not. So, what do you think? Let me know in the comments. :)

As usual, you can find more of my work at Instagram or Facebook. Cheers.