dcstep

I'm drawn to Mike's first color corrected version. For me, it puts emphasis on the "Stairs" and I'm thinking, "WTF was someone thinking putting stairs there?" The scene is ridiculous to me. The terrain isn't challenging enough to require stairs, yet, some entity has chosen to put overly engineer stairs in that place. The crazy color balances of the original and Mike's second version just are off putting to me. I see no contributions coming from those inaccurate colors.

For someone not already tied to a RAW converter, that has need to be concerned about noise reduction, they need to also consider DxO Photolab. IME DxO has the best NR program when applied in RAW conversion. I still have Topaz AI to work with iPhone images, but for RAW images, DxO and Topaz are pretty close to the same, which is excellent. I slightly prefer Topaz AI's sharpening tool as it's very intuitive to work with and very effective. Here's an image taken at ISO 32000, with RAW conversion in DxO PhotoLab:

Skipton Castle

I think that the heads, ready for mounting do seem as if they're crooning lustily, but they're lost in all the other stuff. Without the title, I wouldn't get it as is. Clearing the chairs away, and/or getting in tighter on the heads would really step this up for me. I "get it" as is, but not without the title.

I totally agree with Edwin's reaction and critical comments. I wish that there were more emphasis on the "singers."

FE 600mm f/4 GM OSS