Portrait Of Autumn

I liked the contrast of the warm fall foliage set against the cool color

cast of the columnar basalt cliffs. Please take a moment to comment.

Regards, Joe

This is an absolutely beautiful shot Joseph! Nice composition, and excellent eyes guy. 7/7 anon

Neil

Thank you for the compliment Neil, much appreciated! Of course, some jerk had to give me a 3/3 without an explanation. Oh well, I've come to expect that here.

Anyway, I took this shot at a scenic turnout along rte. 12 in WA. I was impressed by the basaltic cliffs, the foliage was a bonus!

Regards, Joe

Beautiful range of colors. 6/6

Beautiful shot Joseph. I really love your use of color here, having the warm tones with the cool blues and greens really give this image excellent color depth. Really nice composition also, only thing that I would like to see a little different is the orange leaves in the top right corner I wish weren't there. It makes that corner so much brighter than the other corners and my eye keeps wanting to go up there and out of th image. But as we all know with nature getting the perfect compostion isn't always possible and so you have trade offs. One thing I might have tried is to darken that corner some more. If you like these types of images, have you ever seen Charles Cramers work, www.charlescramer.com. Wonderful proffesional landscape photographer and I was blessed enough to be able to take a workshop from him two years ago. This shot reminds me of his work, which is a very high compliment to you. Overall awesome shot Joseph I really love these "portraits of nature" as I like to call them.

Also I wouldn't worry about the rating system, I have had those types of ratings on just about every image I put up and so I don't put much merit into them. When I see those types of ratings you have to think they probably come from some people that doesn't know the difference between art and a fart. You will also notice they always come from anonymous users.

Thank you for the kind words, Jim.

Eric, I agree with you about the TRC. I thought the exact same thing, but thought that if I cropped that out, it would also eliminate most of that layered basalt formation that's right next to it. I'm attaching a cropped version, let me know if it's an improvement.

Also, thanks for turning me on to Charles Cramer. I'll check out his site and let you know what I think. I've always been a fan of grand landscapes, but lately I find myself being attracted to more intimate "portraits" as well, which I think can be just as powerful in their own way. Thanks for taking the time to comment.

Regards, Joe

I prefer the "official" version to the crop. I think that bit of color in the corner gives a nice balance to the image, and you definitely lose something by not having every bit of that wonderful basalt formation in the middle. I do agree with Eric that it's a bit bright: perhaps a slight decrease in saturation (of the corner only) would take care of this.

Hey Joseph, I looked at your cropped version and I agree that it does elimante too much of the basalt cliff which I really like in this image. I think John's suggestion in maybe just decreasing the saturation a little and little darking in the corner would be a great fix for it. I'm glad you enjoyed Charles Cramer's work, it surely has been an inspiration to me. In fact it has actually changed my style of photography now, because I really focus more on the intimate parts of nature instead of large landscapes. I too will be checking back to see more of your work as you add it, I just love this style of photography.

Thank you John and Eric for your input, the brightness in the TRC was the only thing that bothered me initially. I only have Elements 2 to edit, how do I isolate just that corner? Your input is definitely appreciated. I'm also attaching another shot of the same scene with more foliage and less rock. Let me know what you think.

Eric, thanks again for turning me on to Charles Cramer. I still love the grand landscapes, but his stuff is just awesome. My favorite is his "Bare Trees, Red Leaves". The stark monochromatic stand of bare trees set against the one tree with red leaves is a really powerful image.

Thanks again guys.

Best regards, Joe

The colors are stunning! Beautiful shot. Best, Leslie

I prefer the version you first posted, Joseph. That beautiful curve in the basalt overhang is a very dynamic element in the image. Regarding a saturation drop in PS Elements: I'm not sure. Is it possible to convert to LAB mode with that program?

Thanks for the compliment Leslie.

John, what is LAB?

Lab is another color space, like RGB, CMYK, or HSL. Unlike, RGB (or CMYK which is conceptually very similar), Lab separates luminosity and color information. In fact, the name stands for the three channels involved - luminosity and color channels "a" and "b". I find it rather difficult to work with (though I'm just learning), but it's wonderful for controlling changes in brightness and contrast without effecting color, and changes in color cast and saturation without affecting brightness or contrast. The hue/saturation/lightness controls give you this, too, but with less fine-grained control. There's an excellent book on LAB by Dan Margulis, called "The Canyon Conundrum".

The main things you'll need for the selective saturation change in this image are (1) either Lab mode or a saturation control and (2) the ability to apply this change only to the leaves at top right. The usually way to pull of this kind of masking in Photoshop is by making the change in an "Adjustment Layer" and then adding a mask on the layer so that the change is only revealed in the desired spot. Another possibility would be to duplicate the image layer, erase everything on the top layer but the corner, apply the adjustment to the top layer, annd flatten everything. I don't know what of this is offered in Elements.