Very nice scenery, well taken. Thanks for the interesting discussion here, my first thought when I saw this was "flat after scanning ? or stressed shadows ?". The photo is definitively worth the effort, and I tried a layer mask for the foreground with only 20% opacity and overlay blending mode for a wee bit enhanced color contrast
Very interesting, should've remembered Kelby. I never really noticed, nor examined the difference between original and resized and reworked version. Very enlightening comparison, definitely makes more sense now...:) Thanks!
About the post-processing: yes, It was a good (rainy) afternoon to do some PS work on this -originally rather dull- image. But I left the sky untouched, I only did some dodging of the foreground (using the technique "Dodging and burning done right" from Scott Kelby's book). I think the cluttering of the treeline has indeed to do with the size reduction, in combination with the sharpening and the JPEG compression. See the attached file: left the original (crop enlarged twice from the original size), right the one published here (crop scaled to the same size as the left image). Here, it is clearly visible that the fine detail of the trees can not be captured in an image of 500 x 600 pixels.
Hi Hermen, the broom in flower, casting yellow smears (not meant negatively, just can't find the right words here) across the landscape arevery nice, but the deep tones of the sky pregnant with rain is ven more impressive. The treeline in the background looks a bit cluttered, as if masking the sky with the select colour tool, copying it onto a new layer and multiplying that layer. Then again, I don't quite think that's it. Maybe it's another sort of postprocessing that causes the contrasts and details in the treeline to be diminuished. Could very well be the size reduction, too. Either way, I like this scene, very well captured.
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