travel - greece - crete [velvia] Looking back on the Omalos Plateau, on the way up to Melindaon

Hi Nick, I hope you do not mind my commenting on this photo before you post it for critique, but I cannot resist. Grand view of this very Mediterranean-looking landscape, one can feel the heat and the cicadas chirping! At this point you must be thinking I have some kind of fixation with colour casts, but I cannot help wondering about that blue one over the distant mountains, or whether what is on the summits of some of them is snow or something else. Nothing wrong with it, but the horizon curving also looks a bit too much for a 28mm to me ... Just wondering, the panorama is great and makes me feel like I am standing there. Cheers!

Thanks Ricardo.

 

I don't mind you commenting at all, I'm excited when someone does.

 

I'm not sure where the blue cast comes from, but there was some little snow on the tops of these mountains, although they are slightly lower that the ridge from which I took this photograph. I did play arround with the colour balance in photoshop, but it only made it worse, so I stuck with what came out of the scanner! This is a scan of a Fuji velvia slide rated 50 ISO, and it was a very bright day. I am still getting to grips with my new scanner, so it may be artifact from the scanning stage.

 

The curve in the distant mountains, however, is at it appears in nature, and is not the result of lens distortion. The Omalos Plateau is a remarkable almost perfectly circular plane, which rests at high altitude between the Lefka Ori (White Mountains) in western Crete. I think it was formed by soil slowly filling up an extinct volcanic crater over a period of millions of years. It really is a remarkable place, but you only really get a feel for the lay of the land if you spend all day hiking up one of the mountains at the side of the crater! - Well worth a visit, as it is also from where the famous trek through the Samarian Gorge begins!

 

Thanks for your kind, helpful and perceptive comments.

 

Regards, Nick.

Nick, a fascinating place! You have got the circular shape nicely. abd i like the roads leading into the plain. I think the blue/cyan cast in the distance is due to the way velvia and to a lesser extent other films react to light. I found a lot of shots from the med area tend to show this. You could select the top of the mountain in PS and adjust the cyan and blue colour to taste as above.

Thanks Colin.

 

Thats a real improvement. I'm still trying to get to grips with photoshop, and will go now and learn how to do what you have just done.

 

With respect, Nick.

I used the lasso tool in PS Elements with an edge feather of a few pixels to select (draw round using the mouse) the snow-covered bit of the left hand peak. That mweans that anything you now do only affects that bit of the shot. Then Enhance > Hue and Saturation > blue then adjust the lightness and saturation. When using PS I always make a copy of the original scan so that if disaster strikes I can go back to it. Have fun! It is a whole new range of creative options.

Any critiques or suggestions would be welcomed - Regards, Nick.

I agree with Colin that the colors are not quite there, but I wonder if there isn't a less tricky way of fixing them.

As a geologist I appreciate that wonderful volvanic crater, as a photographer - I will choose different time with a bit more shadow

Winds up a little odd looking but I tried some simple picture-wide color balancing with no selected areas.

Thanks Ned.

 

Interestingly, your treatment looks more like the scene as a remember the colours on the day, but I think that there is far too much yellow in your version. Can you keep the green, but tone down the yellow?

 

Thanks for your help, Nick.

 

By the way, I liked how you rose to my challenge regarding the B&W still life of the Australian wine.

THIS VELVIA SURE IS TRICKY STUFF!

Hi Nick...i played with this too and very tricky...velvia nitemare...balanced on psp and it didnt come out yellow but lotta blue still...the main thing i found is contrast too high which tends to glump the trees in foreground together...dropped it 20 points...hard pic for sure.

If this was taken at high altitude I think that go a long way to explaining the excess blue. When you are up high you just have more of it.

 

If I were trying to correct the blue in this photo I would convert it to lab color, open a curves window, and tinker with channel B. Another thing that comes to mind is using the selective color tool in RGB color space. I think Thats one of the most effective ways to correct a color shift. You can use it to adjust only blues and leave all else alone. I think you would want to play with the cyan and the blue. Take a little of both out, maybe a little magenta too, and put a good deal of yellow in. Once again you can target those color components in the blue areas only. The rest of the photo wouldn't even be affected so you would not end up with a yellow tone like in the sample someone posted.

 

Its a very nice photo by the way.