Practicing my editing skills

[jterry85]

So... I took this shot while in Luxembourg City and decided to use it for editing practice since I'm going crazy waiting to get home and use my camera. As you can see in the original there was some vignetting, some distracting ugly cranes on the skyline, the sky was dull and flat and the shot overall seemed soft. The main problems I had with the edit was that I couldn't for the life of me get the sky to be a realistic looking color, maybe it's just me though. Also the cliffs still seem a little OOF and soft to me. What I did was crop the original, remove the vignetting, turned the sky into a seperate layer and adjusted the color, hue and lightness of it. I cloned out the cranes and adjusted the contrast. Let me know what you think of my editing job and also feel free to C&C the photo.

Thanks!

Original:

Edit:

 

[jterry85]

Quick update: So apparently I'm color blind or my monitor needs to be calibrated or something because my wife just told me I made the sky purple...

 

[KmH]

Yep! I see purple sky too.

Plus your sky edit is not a gradiant.

Did you notice the vignetting your lens is causing in the corners?

 

[timputtick]

looks a tad fake buddy haha

 

[jowensphoto]

Another seeing a periwinkle sky

The EXIF data seems to have been stripped, so I can't look it up, but do you remember if you shot wide open? That could be the reason for the vignetting.

 

[MarkCSmith]

Besides the purple sky, you've left some weird bits of the crane there, they're distracting

 

[ph0enix]

Quick update: So apparently I'm color blind or my monitor needs to be calibrated or something because my wife just told me I made the sky purple...

Listen to the wife. She's right again!

 

[Robin Usagani]

Even if you nailed the color, it still wont look good.

 

[jterry85]

Quick update: So apparently I'm color blind or my monitor needs to be calibrated or something because my wife just told me I made the sky purple...

Listen to the wife. She's right again!

She usually is! Well thanks guys! I guess it's back to the drawing board for me...

 

[KmH]

What are you using to edit? GIMP? PSP? PsE? PsLr? PsCS5?

 

[jterry85]

I'm using Adobe PSE9 right now and aside from cropping and the "auto smart fix" I'm not very proficient with it so I figured while I was waiting to get home and be able to actually take new photographs I would see if I could work on my PP skills.

 

[480sparky]

It's not purple. It's Mid-day Minnesota Magenta.

 

[Judobreaker]

W00t!
Join the club!

Don't worry, you'll get used to being colorblind and learn to work with it.
I get it right most of the times nowadays.