This is excellent! Yes, so many times you get home, look at a photo, and your reaction is, "Well, that's NOT what I saw!". Even the best camera is a compromise tool that can't see what our eyes and brain see. Lightroom to the rescue!
That's right where I'm at. Exploring the blacks. I got my first inspiration from an oil painting artist, Vanessa Horabuena. She started her work from a black canvas. I hope you and Blake check her out 😮. Thanks again, Rees
Loved the transformation in this photo, Matt; absolutely beautiful work. My only question, however, (assuming you even read these comments) is How did you deal with the noise factor in such a low-light photo? Surely there was a good deal of noise in there after you bumped the exposure up? Or maybe your photographer friend correctly (and deliberately) shot it underexposed and avoided a lot of excessive noise? I ask because I'm still learning and although I love golden hour and low-light photography, I'm a LONG way from really knowing how to do it correctly, so my low-light photos invariably have a lot of noise in them when I try making any edits. Any suggestions or feedback you can offer would be super helpful!
Hi Steve. The noise wasn't a visible issue unless I zoomed in so I didn't bother with it. It would only appear to pixel peepers or a really tight crop (which this photo didn't need). Noise reduction is not something I would ever do to a landscape photo since ISO levels should be low. I'm not sure why the photographer shot it so dark. It was a highly contrasty scene, but it was too dark to me too. But that's not why I chose it. Even when lightened, it wasn't resonating until I did the more targeted edits. Thanks!
Great use of the radial mask. I'm amazed at how much information you were able to pull out of such a dark image. Curious if the image is a 14 or 12 bit raw file? Thanks for another great lesson.
I recently purchased a Nikon Z7 2 to add to mt Leica M10R. Since you have influence I hope, this info needs to be passed on. Problem is Nikon NEF files exaggerate green saturation and nothing I do is a remedy, Pictures taken tame time and place with proper color balance to achieve a neutral grey card exposure shows this. Below is just a copy/paste wi wrote for a web site but info does not get to someone who can independently investigate and start a tutorial on use of Adobe Convert to DNG . This is the solution as I do not like Nikon files that are raw pre edited. Working with Nikon Z7 2 & Leica M10 R I have found found L make perfect colors and N does not. I make pairs from each same time, same place with full sun and NEF file has oversaturated greens being the most obvious. I can not correct this in ACR or NX Studio. Whi Bal grey cards are included in all files and WB is adjusted in camera so both read same values for RGB on the card. This is not a WB issue. I converted NEF to DNG and now files match almost perfectly. Note that under profiles in ACR, L does not have choices, just one neutral or correct . N has 6 +. I want one neutral one not biased as Nikon has done. Japanese films were biased to green also. I used Kodachrome Pro for that reason
