First C&C: Chittenden Locks

cmhbob

No longer a newbie, moving up!
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This is one I took about three years ago in Seattle, while visiting my brother. I didn't really know what I was doing then, and was shooting in Landscape mode on my Fuji S1800. (I have a Nikon D5100 now and I'm going to focus on learning manual mode and getting it right)

I know it's over-exposed (isn't it?), so what I'm looking for is guidance on how to fix it in PP (using GIMP). Edits are welcome, but please tell me how you did what you did.


Chittenden Locks (1) by Raven's Beak, on Flickr
 
$lock.webp

Yep, it's overexposed. Your highlights are clipped -- the whites (sailboat on right, boats approaching lock, white houses) are blown to the point of data loss. That's the one thing you can't fix. If the camera losses the data you've got nothing to manipulate so you're only option is to replace it if possible. I did that with the sky; I replaced it with a gradient.

It's been awhile since I tried to use GIMP. That was fun; I used GIMP since you're using GIMP. I rotated the photo to straighten the horizon. The camera white balance was set to auto and it really screwed up the color. I did the best I could trying to repair it. I made overall color balance adjustments as well as separate Hue/Saturation changes for example to shift only the greens.

I used Levels to set a black point that's just barely there in the original and I shifted the midpoint to darken the photo. There's a lot of haze in the photo and I used layers and blending modes (Multiply and Soft Light) to cut the haze down. This required using masks on those layers to for example protect the shadows from getting too dark.

The camera's JPEG setting was fairly low and it smeared the fine detail quite a bit -- nothing to do to fix that.

You'll get much better results from your new Nikon. Make sure if you're saving JPEGs that the quality setting is as high as possible and before you worry about learning to use manual, learn to get the camera off auto white balance. It won't work on the Nikon just like it didn't work on the Fuji.

Joe
 

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