into the trail

I like the lighting in this picture. Perhaps different people have

different opinions. It will be great to hear them. Any comments and

critiques are very welcome.

I like the dappling but the dark areas seem a bit too dark. I tried turning up the brightness on my monitor, this didn't help much. I think you could have afforded to give a bit more exposure without burning out the highlights.

Thank you for the feedback. I agree that it's pretty dark. Other shots (i took several of them) had better details in the whole area (brighter + in homogenous tones), but lost dappling and warmth of this one. I chose this image particulary because of the brownish cast that gave warmth. A little bit of post-processing might help, but I haven't tried yet. Thank you again.

I like the warm tones too, Kay. I also might have said it's a tad dark had I not been recently shooting in forests. Don't know how this scene actually appears, but it looks pretty convincing as being the way it was.

 

Again, a B/W for discussion. I think Doug's having too much of an influence on me. :-)

Thanks a lot again Michael! The B&W conversion is never easy for me!!#$!! I tried to follow your description in my previous picture, but it turned out to be too dark. So if I make a B&W print, I'd better use your version, haha. And I like this conversion, too. This is way cool. Did you use channel mixer this time, too?

This is one of the other shots. Although it's not as dark as the posted image, it is not so interesting to me.

Kay, I began playing with the color version to see where it took me, and wanted to see if Richard's suggestion might have improved the image.

 

So here's what I did:

 

Created a Contrast Mask using the Blue channel (in this case, the darkest of the RGB channels). Basically, you take the Blue channel, convert it to B/W, then to Negative, and paste it as a new layer over the original in [Overlay] mode while adjusting opacity to set the desired contrast. It's pretty intuitive if you think about it; an inverted monochrome image over the original will only affect contrast since it contains only luminance information.

 

Once the desired contrast is achieved, I flattened the layers then played with Curves to fine tune, still in color. At this point, it became clear to me that B/W will work much better given the amount of detail.

 

So I tried two versions - a straight conversion to B/W, and another lightly toned sepia (Hue-23, Saturation-20). I preferred the sepia toned, so that's what I posted.

 

If all this sounds confusing, it's actually pretty straight forward once you get the hang of it. Try Goggling key words "Contrast Mask", "Channel mixer" and "Sepia Toning" for more information.

Oops, just saw the new post, and I agree, it looks rather bland compared to the first.

Sorry that I couldn't get back earlier. Thank you so much for the details. The channel mixing things are still confusing to me (also mask, layer, unsharp mask etc etc). Think I need more consideration on colors to make it intuitively understood.

Kay, these things can be indeed confusing. I would recommend a Photoshop reference book as a guide; well worth the investment. I learn best through hands-on exploration and Internet tutorials, but it's not the most suited approach for everyone.