Benches

[IMG]http://i39.tinypic.com/wmm2f.jpg[/IMG]


I've been playing around with this one for a couple of days, cant make my mind up whats wrong with it, ie, perspective, to contrasty,or just a bad image. The original was colour and looked pants. What do the experts think.

All C&C welcome

Well I am anything but an expert but I just tried:

a) cropping to get the tree line in the background horizontal.
b)Cropping again to get the near leg of the bench near the bottom of the picture and the tree line on the third resulting in a letter box format. (Looking again it is on the 2/5ths... )
c)Turning the contrast down a little. I did it crudely with the central slider of the levels command (gamma?) but a curves adjustment would be better.

Other peeps would do other things, no doubt

HLH. Kris.

Hi Cliff,I wouldn't call myself an expert but my eye tells me.Tighter crop,level the tree line and put it through levels and curves for a bit more contrast.The histogram in levels shows a lot of adjustment to be made.Hope that helps.Tony-O Ahh! Shucks,Just beaten too it by 10 secs!Well done Womble very nimble.

I'm no expert, but for me it looks too grey. Hope that makes sense!

Straighten the tree line and lose some of the foreground.

Right. It's unremittingly sombre. No amount of cropping is going to cure the fact that the light was wrong.

Try again another day.

G

Agreed, the image doesnt have enough contrast, it needs more lighter tones, as it stands its just drab and depressing, a bit like watching Eastenders

Colour images are usually always lacking in contrast when turned in to black and white, try adjusting the levels or the curves.

How did you do the B&W conversion? I'm not sure what facilities paintshop pro has, but the B&W conversion layer in Photoshop CS3 allows one to selectively darken or lighten various "colours" by dragging the mouse across them. You can also mimic the effect of various coloured filters. George is probably right though, there is a good photo to be had from the scene, but the light could well be better.

I might also suggest getting closer but with a wider angle lens to exaggerate the perspective a bit, but I'd need to be there to see if that would help

Cheers, Kris.

Hi Cliff,

Well.....if the original shot hasn't got it, it is going to be very difficult if not impossible to make it a good one. The best advise came fro George, I think.
Still......a few things have been mentioned like: contrast adjustment, playing with levels and straightening the photo a bit. Oh....and losing some foreground. I had a play with it, did the things suggested above and duo toned it. Finally I added some diffuse glow. Still no winner, but........



Martin.

hmmm... don't know if I like the colour martin but I do like the crop.

I'm with George - accept it for what it is and move on. Personally I think it would be very hard to make a good photo from the subject you chose - which I suppose is part of the appeal.

Mike

Hi Kris, for conversion I used the coloured filter facility in PSP, I think it was the red filter which gave the image best clarity/definition, played around with it that much I've
forgotten tbh.Thanks Martin for having a go. I can see now how important good cropping is to an image, now that you guys have pointed it out. I played around with levels tones and contrast and still couldn't get it to look right.


Tony,Graham,Peter,George,Spider,mike, Cheers for advice and comments hopefully some of it will sink in.


Cheers