If you do need to carry out manual work using a de-saturation technique, the problem can be that whilst the colour can be removed, a grey tone or brightness reduction will remain. But I have found (in Photoshop Elements) that you can restore this brightness following colour removal with a pull up on the Luminace slider (this is in the Hue / Saturation dialogue.)

Its best to select the CA fringe first with the selction brush set to just wider than the fringe so your colour removal and luminance changes are isolated to this narrow zone.

Just seen these Philip, and my favourite is the closer view in No2, I really love the gold in that one. That last one of the wall is good too -there's a good balance between shadow and highlight tone, nicely controlled.

I too like the composition in the 4th, (as David originally pointed out), but the underexposure in the shadows is too much I feel - the DR seems too high.

This sort of thing is a constant frustration with reviews - you never know if it indicates that the writer doesn't actually know, or that they're writing to various constraints and its been edited poorly by someone who doesn't understand the review.

First one for me too very effective with full dof like this. What was your aperture, and was the camera supported?

A very striking image, absolutely, well shot and the sunlight is emphasised very nicely.

I know no-one else has mentioned it, so you can reject this as unqualified if you feel so, but I don't really like the very severe darkening of the clouds across the top right of the sky, which has a kind of almost vignette type effect.
Mcg
It could be easily be altered with a pull up on the levels black output control, with the sky selected first . I think its worth a try anyway

It makes good sense to use these tools and techniques to improve the exposure at capture, and it need not interfere with any creative flow, just needs to be built into a natural shooting workflow, and of course practice makes perfect

Gary, as I understand it, the option to link active focus point to the metering will not limit the reading only to that focus point area, but will give extra bias to that area. In multi-zone mode you're still getting all the advantages of the wide range of readings and rebalancing (say for backlighting) but with that central bias on your focus point. For af work this would arguably be more accurate and faster than centre-weighted metering.

Its not for raw,no, but is highly controllable so. A good approach if using it would be to deactivate nr in the converter, save out to 16bit tiff and topaz can be used directly on this I'm elements or on a duplicate layer for extra flexibility.

The latest version 5 is very fast and computer performance is high, helpful and efficient when zooming back and forward to 100% and so on and scrolling quickly around parts of the shot. This is a problem in some raw software which struggles to render on the fly when doing this sort of work.

The slider inputs needed are very small - I am most setting only up to 0.7 on the master control. You get extra control over just the shadows or yellow and blue colour noise also. But the biggest advantageis the compensatory detail and deblur sliders, allowing you to restore microcontrast within the single interface.

Afaik elements only has two or three controls in acr, and its a bit limiting as it is. I don't think you could apply different types of reduction to different areas, eg shadows and then white clouds. The best and most controllable option I have found is Topaz DeNoise, a plugin for ps and elements. This has sliders for each noise ccomponent so you can precisely control how much is applied. Very quick and easy.

Jim, please don't. You have simply mis-interpreted my intro comments here, which are entirely joking ('you'd be thinking my K7 would be up for grabs in the classifieds') . I'm always pleased if my images generate such strong and detailed feedback, and as I said on the other thread it was all much appreciated, not least those things you said yourself - so bring it all on again!

You're right John, self confidence has never been in short supply for me , but its always important to stand back and see what others are seeing. I admit that the colours seem OK on my laptop monitor, but David reminded be below about the monitor temperature, so thats what I'll check out and run some shots through again using the same steps and see if that improves it.

If I'm understanding right, starting out in Adobe RGB (in 16bit) and finisihing in sRGB with 8bit JPEGs should not really give this type of problem should it? If not, then it makes sense to look at the monitor I guess.

And thanks to all the others here who have made very useful observations - I'm glad that there are others who are able to take something away from it as well.

After the utter pasting I took yesterday with my Surrey Gardens selection - (colours, DOF, compositions, intrusions, overhangs, geese, too much grass, wrong kind of leaves ... ) you'd be thinking my K7 would be up for grabs in the classifieds.... but, no ... I'm leaping straight back into the ring with a splash of new images from Polesden Lacy in the Surrey Hills.

These have been waiting to be processed from DNGs since the summer, so I saw a good excuse to get them up and running. I hope that some might appeal .... all constructive critisc.....(no, better not say that!)

All taken with the K7 & DA 18-55WR.