Liberty Of The Seas

zutty · Jan 7, 2016

D810#3 Bug Light-Sunset 24-70 HD29d by J T, on Flickr

jcdeboever · Jan 8, 2016

Pretty cool.

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DrumsOfGrohl · Jan 8, 2016

You nailed the sunburst!

JMarro · Jan 8, 2016

I can't tell if you used a hard grad ND filter or its just the post processing, but the sky is a bit too darkened to be realistic and spills over to the main subject (the ship). Tone that down a bit and I think the picture would be much better. Compositionally, I think the picture looks nice. TFS

Tim Tucker · Jan 8, 2016

I'm really not understanding this or some of the comments, there are so may things that are obviously wrong.

The main illumination is clearly the sun, to the left and off frame. So why has the extra sun been added? (And that's without even mentioning the complete lack of the added sun's reflection.)

Zutty: When you keep adding drama in the sky you seem to do it by separating with a mask then (probably through curves) push the contrast (probably again) by pulling down the shadows quite severely. By not separating your luminosity from the colour you're also pushing the saturation of the colours to the extent that they no longer relate to the colour palette shown in the rest of the image. In musical terms the sky is playing a different tune in both colour and rhythm to the foreground.

The sky shows a dominant hue around 220 degrees with a brightness of between 25-55%. The sea, which is a reflection of the sky in both colour and brightness, shows a far more blue/green hue with a brightness of around 65-85%!

Sorry to be so blunt here but photography is a visual art and as photographers we should be practiced at looking and observing. So why are we not seeing such an obvious mis-match between the sky and the foreground?

Artistically, whether you choose to go abstract or for realism it's a cardinal rule that you should keep some consistency across your frame.
Aesthetically, if you saw this scene in real life you would run for cover, it would look so wrong you might think the world was coming to an end.

JonA_CT · Jan 8, 2016

Looks like one of the smoke stacks of the boat got caught in some of the processing too -- it's almost black compared to the white of the things around it. Masking on the horizon is funky too.

Didereaux · Jan 8, 2016

Tim Tucker said:
I'm really not understanding this or some of the comments, there are so may things that are obviously wrong.

The main illumination is clearly the sun, to the left and off frame. So why has the extra sun been added? (And that's without even mentioning the complete lack of the added sun's reflection.)

Zutty: When you keep adding drama in the sky you seem to do it by separating with a mask then (probably through curves) push the contrast (probably again) by pulling down the shadows quite severely. By not separating your luminosity from the colour you're also pushing the saturation of the colours to the extent that they no longer relate to the colour palette shown in the rest of the image. In musical terms the sky is playing a different tune in both colour and rhythm to the foreground.

The sky shows a dominant hue around 220 degrees with a brightness of between 25-55%. The sea, which is a reflection of the sky in both colour and brightness, shows a far more blue/green hue with a brightness of around 65-85%!

Sorry to be so blunt here but photography is a visual art and as photographers we should be practiced at looking and observing. So why are we not seeing such an obvious mis-match between the sky and the foreground?

Artistically, whether you choose to go abstract or for realism it's a cardinal rule that you should keep some consistency across your frame.
Aesthetically, if you saw this scene in real life you would run for cover, it would look so wrong you might think the world was coming to an end.

YES! Glad someone else noticed that false Sun thing. Not a good PS job at all.

zutty · Jan 9, 2016

Here's the shot with no processing

D810#3 Bug Snset_016 by J T, on Flickr

jcdeboever · Jan 9, 2016

I have no issue at all. I liked your adjustment. I felt like painting it so it is a winner for me.

Tim Tucker · Jan 9, 2016

zutty said:
Here's the shot with no processing
D810#3 Bug Snset_016 by J T, on Flickr

I showed the first edit to my partner, then explained how the sun had been added, "oh," she said, "I thought that was the moon."

The point is that even a non-artistic un-trained eye instinctively knows when things are wrong because they spend all day and every day looking at the real world. They are used to seeing things in a certain way, they are used to a certain logic.

We do not see and understand instantly and intuitively, we see and make sense of what we see through practice and experience. When we look at your un-edited shot above we almost instantly know that there is a weak and low sun shining from off the frame to the left. We know this not instinctively but because the patterns of colour, light and shade are consistent with when we've seen this before. Our brains recognise the visual clues, we remember where we've seen them before and the association is made. We know that pillows are soft and fluffy not through instinct but experience. We recognise soft and fluffy only because we've seen it before and remember what it looks like.

However we, in the western world particularly, are quite lazy with our vision. We tend to glance at something and let our memory fill in the gaps (in the same way that we don't always listen and our brains fill in the gaps). We don't really look.

As photographers I find that many are familiar with the way that they move the sliders in their editing programs, they have seen the look and are familiar with the logic that produces it. Then some seem to switch their brains completely off

. Honestly, I've seen images with serious red colour casts (under-exposed and over-processed HDR where the only colour is produced by the over-saturation of an error in the white balance) being presented as realistic landscapes and praised by other photographers for their "beautiful colours".

Now with you original edit I can see straight away that the foreground is lit from the left and is fairly normal. I can also see that more saturated and thinner, colours in the sky are far more abnormal as is the lack of brightness and excess of contrast. The sky is clearly not lit by the same light source as the foreground because the colour, brightness, and contrast of the sky does not match the visual pattern the light produces when it reflects off the foreground objects.

It looks far more abnormal because you've contrasted it with something normal, you've given us the normal view against which to compare it. The cardinal rule of keeping a consistency is really the basic principle of contrasting elements, you make things stand out by making them different. You get away with it because a lot of people don't really look. They're lazy with their vision and only glance, letting their memory fill in the gaps. But for those that do look the interpretation of that sky may not be beauty but impending disaster and doom simply because it is not a view they've seen (they are not photographers so haven't produced it themselves in editing programs), and because they've not seen it it is not associated with a natural phenomenon.
If you saw a sky like that approaching in real life would you admire it's beauty or run?

This is not a simple schoolboy error but comes from the assumption that sight is absolute and not realising that what you think you see is just a construct of the brain, especially when you just glance at things. This is very easy to demonstrate as the human eye is quite a poor optical instrument and is not capable of producing the sweeping sharp vistas you think they see with corner to corner and near to far sharpness. That is entirely a result of the human brain processing.

I've had the image below posted seriously as being much better and more realistic than the original posted below it. Why? How can anybody not see the difference? Simple, but mind boggling at the same time. If you make the mistake of thinking that vision is absolute and that you see with corner to corner sharpness then you produce an image with corner to corner sharpness. If you don't understand that your eye scans a vista constantly re-focussing then you completely miss how your perception of depth may be in part linked to this. If you don't understand that your memory of snow is white (you even see shadowed snow as being white!!!) then you miss how your brain corrects for the blue colour cast caused by the ice crystals in shadowed snow reflecting the blue of the sky, and you also miss how your brain adds the colour back in your edit even while your hands process it out. And if you're obsessed with all of this you completely miss how you can use relative brightness to draw the viewers eye to a small and insignificant object.

Seeing things objectively is not as easy as it looks.