Boats Under Bridge

K-5 with 150 500 Siggy

Very nicely framed image there, I like this a lot.

Agreed, very effective tight framing - the layout invites a wandering eye and the contrast between the mono-toned foreground and colourful boats works very well.

The deep black underneath the right bridge arch is distracting I think - if possible I would select it and try some heavy lifting shadow recovery - see what comes out!

Very subtle but the best I can do without photoshop
I concede it looks more inviting

Thanks McGregor

Hi Alastair, hope you don't mind, but I had a greater effect in mind ...

here's what I could do in Sagelight 4.0, and that's only on your 500kb jpeg - I'm sure with the RAW plus some proper noise reduction and detailing after it would much better quality - but this gives you the idea. Of course there's a patch of pure black that's totally lost, but that could be 're-built' with cloning I guess

I'm 50:50 on the dark arch here, this version I find a bit too bright and half way between this and the previous correction would look more realistic to my eyes.

I do see a huge improvement here in that the processing seems to have toned down harsh tone mapping on the main bridge face. I would also want to bring some shadows back to the left hand arch and sort out the processing artifacts showing on the main bridge arch edge - which would really mean going back to the original image before the tone mapping stuff was applied. If the OP fancies putting up the original raw/jpeg without additional processing applied I'll happily have a go.

I feel a 'photo processing shootout' coming on ... I'm in

Its amazing what has been recovered here, great testimony both to the capabilities of the Sagelight software and the camera sensor ... From the photo Alastair posted who'd have thought there was any stonework to be seen under that arch?

I applied the shadow boost globally and added 'smart contrast before wiping out the effect on the rest of the shot ... so it is easy to bring back shadow boost elsewhere.

But is it really 50:50 Rob? Surely with the amount of very bright light reflecting off the water my version is the most 'realistic'?

wow

Thanks guys for getting back to me with all the edits

What is this Sagelight about McGregor - would be interested to hear more

Cheers

I cant believe that you were able to do all that with an ISO800 compressed file!

QC

Ah....
Thats a Mac thing right?

I only use Lightroom 3

No, it not for Mac - 100% Windows compatable ... check it out, extraordinary piece of photo software .... (Sagelight Image Editor link )

Its an interesting combination of RAW-Converter style working plus many menu accessed panels for every imaginable photo adjustment. It doesn't use layers, but has a system of automatic masking available throughout to limit working and apply things selectively - but with no 'selections'.

Very intuitive and I highly recommend it to everyone.

Yes, incredible shadow recovery from that small file - the quality available from the RAW will be excellent. Lightroom? - hmm, I'm not so sure that would be able to cope with it

cheers!