Pulling my hair out with LR

[Dubaiian]

Hi Everyone,


You may have seen some of my previous posts whereby I want to get better at Landscapes. I saw this bridge in Lisbon the sun was going down perfectly, I set what I thought were good setting and pressed the button. In camera it looked great; when I got home it was not so good, so I tried to change it around in LR. Picture 1 is my feeble attempt to make it look like what I saw with my eyes and picture 2 is the OOC image just cropped a bit as this is the part of the scene that I liked. To help with the feeling, I had been on a conference all week with good colleagues (friends), was having a late lunch and beers and thought, this is my memory of Lisbon.

Can anyone help me with what I am doing wrong? If the original image is OK, happy to submit the RAW to let someone play.

Canon 7d, 24-105, ISO 100, 28mm, f/11, 1/160 (no tripod, so hand help on a rail)

Many thanks in advance

Ian

 

[Bynx]

I dont see what is wrong with the OOC original. Your processing with LR screwed the image up. Just toss it. Your original OOC shot has some detail in the white highlights on the boats. In Photoshop if you used Highlight/Shadows you might pull out some details in the shadow areas, like the bridge and under the docks. But as it stands there is nothing wrong the the original image. In my opinion. Here I just did an auto color/Gamma Correction and unsharp mask.

 

[McNugget801]

Nothing special about the first shot aside from your sentimental value and LR cant fix that.

 

[JClishe]

The reason the RAW looks different in LR than on your camera's LCD is because your 7D is showing you the preview with a picture style applied ("Standard" by default on Canon's) and LR is applying the Adobe Standard profile. If you go to the Develop Module | Camera Calibration panel and select the Camera Standard profile you'll start out with an image that's much closer to what you saw on your camera's LCD.

Your edited version appears to have too much saturation (or Vibrance, hard to tell which one you used), and I'm guessing you went up to either a medium or strong tone curve which caused a bit of clipping on both ends. In your edited version the back of the boat is overexposed and the underside of the bridge is underexposed.

And BTW there's no need for a tripod based on your exposure settings, or even to brace yourself against a rail as you mentioned. Hand held at these settings is perfectly fine.

 

[gsgary]

When you look at your camera screen you are not seeing a raw file thats why it looks dofferent after its been through raw convertion it should look much better, i don't use LR i use Capture One i find it much better