Looking for some critique on this photo

[Ysarex88 82]

Link to the original file

Have at it if you guys want to

Dropbox - DSC02390.ARW

OK.

First analysis -- this is the histogram of your ARW file:

And this is the JPEG the camera created from that raw file:

So you got a couple folks mention exposure. On that graph up there I put a vertical yellow line. Ideal exposure would have the green histograms you see there very close to that yellow line. So what that's telling us is that you could (and should) have exposed more. All that beach and water are pretty bright and what happened is that the above normal brightness caused your camera light meter to react and pull back on the exposure. You have a control on your camera marked EC (exposure compensation). That would have allowed you to counter the light meter's poor response -- but to do that you've got to train yourself to see it coming. A plus 1.3 EC would have done the job here.

The next thing you see in the graphs above is how horizontally compact they are. The scene has very little dynamic range. It's mostly sky, water and sand all at pretty similar values. That explains why the photo from the camera looks dull and flat. We can counter that in processing. If the JPEG from the camera matters to you then there's a control on the camera to boost contrast.

You had the camera set to auto White Balance. Notice how Designer mentioned he made a WB adjustment. He could see that the photo was excessively blue. That's an auto WB failure in this case. Again we can fix that in processing but if you want a better camera JPEG you're going to have to eventually get off the auto WB and start taking control of that. Auto WB is just a marketing dept. name for "camera can't do that."

DSC02390.pp3

That's a link to a .pp3 Raw Therapee file. RT saves all it does in a instruction file with the name of the file and the extension .pp3. It's just a text file so you can save it and copy it to the directory where you have your .ARW file and when you open RT it will read the .pp3 file automatically and show you everything that I did.

I adjusted WB with the WB sampler tool. You didn't shoot a reference so I looked around in the photo and tried different areas to sample. I settled on the gray roof of the bldg. left edge 1/3 from the bottom (it gave me the sky color I expected).

Look at the Exposure adjustments and you'll see I've raised the exposure quite a bit (back to the histogram above). Also not that I've raised the contrast a lot ditto the above histogram.

It's a good shot of the beach from that vantage point. Keep shooting and you'll get better controlling the camera.

Joe

P.S. Do you have any other photo editing software as further improvements can be made beyond what RT can do?

 

[Coreysaysyo]

P.S. Do you have any other photo editing software as further improvements can be made beyond what RT can do?

Wow joe, I really appreciate this explanation. Thanks for even taking the time to write all of this up!

This has been an excellent learning experience for me, and I am going to take the pp3 and see exactly what you did with the photo. In the future I need to start paying more attention when shooting, and try to get the exposure right in the camera. Plus I need to do some more studying of the histogram.

Looking at the image you came up with, compared to what I had originally, it is just so much more vibrant and colorful.

Thanks again Joe, and I really appreciate this.

But no, RawTherapee is all I have at the moment. I don't have the money for something along the lines of Lightroom. I mean, is there any other programs that are better than RT but wont break the bank?

Thanks so much!

 

[Ysarex88 82]

P.S. Do you have any other photo editing software as further improvements can be made beyond what RT can do?

Wow joe, I really appreciate this explanation. Thanks for even taking the time to write all of this up!

This has been an excellent learning experience for me, and I am going to take the pp3 and see exactly what you did with the photo. In the future I need to start paying more attention when shooting, and try to get the exposure right in the camera. Plus I need to do some more studying of the histogram.

Looking at the image you came up with, compared to what I had originally, it is just so much more vibrant and colorful.

Thanks again Joe, and I really appreciate this.

But no, RawTherapee is all I have at the moment. I don't have the money for something along the lines of Lightroom. I mean, is there any other programs that are better than RT but wont break the bank?

Thanks so much!

You're great with Raw Therapee. It's an excellent raw converter. There's just a few tweaks that could be done with a raster type editor along the lines of Photoshop. Download GIMP (free) and you'll have what you need.

Joe

 

[Coreysaysyo]

Now I do have gimp, I use it for my photoshop need all of the time

I will have to check it out for my photo editing.

Thanks again

 

[Sicboi]

Ah, this is great. I like how straight everything feels and how it makes you want to come back. I wonder where all the people are at in the beach strip. Not much going on in the left. Amazing feeling, what a rush.