They just don't look as good as others... ? (Help)

Your exposure is good but bad wb. The sky is overcast and not much you can do to retreive details there except reducing the exposure. But that would result in severe underexposure.

Much of the gd pictures here are result of careful and creative use of post processing. Heres your picture after 10mins in photoshop. The sky is created with gradient tool. Image is color balanced, sharpened, saturation boosted. Some selective bluring with layers to reduce the jagginess and halos, slight cropping, vignetting added. Its not perfect but you get the idea what we do here.



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I like the composition of your shot.

Fact is though, we don't always get ideal conditions and the sun ain't always where we want it -- sometimes it isn't there at all!

No matter. One thing I'd suggest is that you keep a Sky Library. Whenever I see a sky I like, I'll take a RAW shot and keep it in a library of skies catalogued by condition and time.

Then, when I have a shot like this I want to save, there's an approriate sky I can use.

Cheating? Nah, artisitic licence ...

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Dave Underwood
Travel Writer and Photographer

Nice job Phil. Not too much . . . looks great.
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Joe

Old Acct: http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/postersprofile.asp?poster=hjigihivhdif

Hi,

You are correct - a cloudy day spent in SouthWold !

You certainly had a sunnier day than I did - thanks for sharing your pictures..

It's quite dissapointing when you go out to shoot some nice pictures only to get home and find they are all dulll....

I am in the process of learning the power of PS to help improve my shots.

John

=)

You beat me to it !! Nice Job

Thank you for taking the time to "have a play" with my image... nice work

I will take your tips into account and try them out on my other shots.

CityLights said:

All the shots you posted were good, but this last one is awesome.
It captures the mood of the whole beach fun experience.

Click to expand...

Thanks Citylights!

It's encouraging to get good feedback from people like you. I'm a big fan of your work so that means a lot to me. Do you have any advice on the proccesing I did? This is one area where I have a lot to learn.

I have not tried your method yet, as it seems like a lot of work but I might try it on this shot because it's probably worth it.

Thanks again!

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Phil

Continental Phil said:

Do you have any
advice on the proccesing I did? This is one area where I have a lot
to learn.

Click to expand...

I have no advice for that shot, other that PRINT IT! Looks great.

Continental Phil said:

I have not tried your method yet, as it seems like a lot of work
but I might try it on this shot because it's probably worth it.

Click to expand...

Once you get it down it only takes a 2-3 minutes for an average shot. You can of course spend more time on a great shot! It is a little convoluted because I like the maximum flexibility of using the opacity sliders. There are lots of ways to post process, that is just the way that I like for PSE3.

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CityLights
http://www.pbase.com/citylights/favorites
http://www.pbase.com/citylights/favorite_portraits
http://www.pbase.com/citylights/favorite_animals
.

Biggest problem is the sky. It's blown all to hell. You might be able to recover it in RAW by adjusting the main brightness slider in DPP. Or just cut an paste some sky from another photo.

The second problem is contrast. I find that in general, an unprocessed RAW shot lacks 'punch'. To fix this, dial up the contrast. Be careful not to blow the highlights in the process. One nice way to do this is with a local contrast enhancement using the USM. In USM set the amount to something like 25%, or lower if you want a more subtle effect, and the radius to a large amount, 64-250 pixels depending on the picture. This will amp up the contrast, and to my eye makes the photos look sharper. You'll still want to do a sub-pixel sharpening pass with USM (with the radius 1 pixel or below).