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lazysummerday — fail
Published: 2008-03-30 21:15:06 +0000 UTC; Views: 195; Favourites: 0; Downloads: 4
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alright now, as Alex here put up a challenge, I actually went out and tried to shoot an "overcast" picture. I know, I failed miserably
well, it was 17.34, I could not stick around there for three hours to wait for a sunset, guess my timing kinda sucked. The only filter I have (yet) is a Polarizer, which I used. Apart from filters, I'm not sure if there is any way to make this look more interesting? I'd really be grateful for any hints.
This is a completely unedited shot. I have a raw file of it, whenever I have the time I will try to learn something about HDR, crop and edit this if there is any hope.
my apologies to everyone whose eyes I've insulted by posting this!
PS: I'll get back up there on a clear day with my tripod to try and get a nice panorama shot of the hills and the snow mountains surrounding Winterthur, my current hometown. It's with nearly (!) 100'000 inhabitants the 6th biggest city of Switzerland
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Comments: 13
The location is the top plattform of the Eschenberg tower, isn'it?
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yes it is, how did you know? And how did you come across this picture?
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Quite simple, I live near Winterthur. I found the picture because I put in the name of the town into the search engine.
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I would comment, but it seems Alex covered everything I was going to say and then some. Kudos for trying, we're all still trying to improve. I learned a couple of things from the tips.
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thank you very much, that's really nice to hear 
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This shot is better than you think, certainly the veiw is wonderful and the kight cirrus give a great sky. The main reason it doesnt look good is that you have a few technical faults here. Fortunately most of this can be corrected in photoshop, although it is better to get it right at the time.
So to start off you have a wonderful veiw overlooking a patchwork of colourful trees under a blue sky. Unfortunately the shot doesnt quite acheive this because:
The shot is underexposed. Clouds like this should be white when here they are a light grey. Look at the image histogram [link]
you can see that there are no white tones...
This can be corrected with levels.
The shot has a red cast. Notice how the clouds which should be white are actually a red grey...The white balance on your camera was worng, or you were using a filter which produced a colour cast. This can be corrected easily with the middle dropper tool in the Levels box.
The shot is unsersaturated and lacking in contrast. Often on hazy days in particular, what the camera captures is not nearly as good as we see. That is because our eyes have an inherant ability to cut through haze (we basically just imagine it out). To counter this film photographers would use a film like fuji velvia for its higher saturation and contrast. In photoshop this is another easy fix. Simply increase the contrast and saturation....
I have made all these changes as well as a couple of slightly more fiddly, but less important changes to your shot. The corrected vesion is in my scraps. Here: [link]
Tell me if you wish for me to remove it.
Alex
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now that just made the embarrassment worthwhile
I still have a few questions if you don't mind... I'm not sure what you mean with "levels" and the "middle dropper tool in the Levels box". I've been working with shutter speed and a bit with the aperture, but I'm still trying to get the hang out of this camera. I'm on it though. Just figured out where the histogram is hidden...
do you know by any chance an (easily understandable) infopage about white balance? I do know something about medium grey as I did an analogue photo course in b/w, but I have yet no clue how to work with colours...
a polarizer doesn't produce a red cast, does it?
increasing contrast and saturation in PS is okay, I also like to work with layers there. But what can I do about this issue while taking the shot with a DSLR? Or would that lead too far for the moment? I don't want to bother you with asking too many details.
what you did with that pic in photoshop is great! I will try to get the same effects myself, there's always more to learn. Feel free to leave it in your scraps as long as you wish
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Levels is a photoshop tool that is very easy to use. It basically allows you to manipulate the histogram. Curves is a more advanced and more powerful tool, but it is also less intuitive and most of the time levels will give the same result faster.
I cant seem to find a simple page on white balance although I am sure they exist. Its really nothing to be worried about, certainly worrying about colour temperature and things is completely pointless. If you use your camera white balance presets for the right lighting conditions then you should get good results straight away. To sum up what white balance is for...Light on a scene can have a colour cast. A blue sky will produce a blue colour cast, the light of the setting sun may produce an orange colour cast. Lots of the time you actually want those colour casts. On other occasions you may want to remove them. Setting the white balance in your camera should remove or reduce colour casts when used correctly. If you get ti wrong you can always correct ti in Photoshop!
You should have been ablue to get quite close to the edited version in camera. The whitebalance has a red cast, which is unusual, there is a good posibility it is the polariser, but certainly if it wasnt you would be able to fix it by selecting the correct white balance preset. The underexposure you can also correct for in camera by checking your cameras histogram to see if you have and white (the clouds) in the scene, or if the camera has mistakenly underexposed (which can happen a lot but is again easy to correct in photoshop)
The polariser could have produced the colour cast if it was a cheap one, but good polarisers dont produce colour casts. It would be easy to check this by putting the white balance on a preset then taking two shots, one with the polariser and one without, of a light grey background.
Hope that help, if you have any other questions, I dont mind answering.
Alex
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you're a real sweetheart
alright, I'd understood the levels were some setting of the camera, got me kinda confused. When it's photoshop I'll figure it out - or if not, I'll have a class called image processing on friday
I just checked my filter and I don't think it's the problem. Although it does darken the picture quite much (hama; reads: eliminates haze, absorbs UV radiation, filter factor 3-4x). Don't know what you call expensive, but with ~ 30£ I didn't find it exactly cheap...
well, I'll go and play around with the white balance and exposure for a while now
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well expensive is £90 which is what mine cost me!
I should be studying too
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err okay... that's a bit out of reach for the moment. I already have two jobs besides my 100% studies and I'm still getting nowhere 
which would mean I'd have to pass the exams... alright, let's get to work.
hey, what's it you're studying?
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well I invested quite a bit in camera gear after a sucessful exhibition last year...I'm not complaining!
I study Aeronautical Engineering which isnt exactly fun, but I am scraping through. I had retakes last year which kind of spoilt my summer. What do you study?
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technical writing, basically. yours sounds much more interesting though
congrats on your exhibition
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