Some help with this landscape photo for my daughter please.

[Wink Jones]

My wife and I went to visit our daughter and her husband, and most importantly, our grandkids last week. Cissy decided we would probably like to see the ocean, so we drove down to see it, had a beer and then drove back over a mountain pass to get back to her house in Toluca Lake. As we crested the mountain there was this view with layered ranges of mountains semi hidden in the haze.

Cissy pulled into a wide spot and said what she really loved was the layers of mountains. I have played with this in Lightroom and with two plugins, ON1 Resize AI and ON1 NoNoise AI.

Here is the original:

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And here is the cropped shot as edited.

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I have saved these as 150 PPI so that they will be small enough to fit here. The "finished" shot is cropped to a 10 x 8 size. Suggestions are actively requested. I found it difficult make much adjustment to the sky without causing problems with the haze and the layered mountain range look she liked in real life.

 

[aolander]

Cropped and some work with masking in LR.

You could have dropped your shutter speed quite a bit and had a lower ISO with minimal noise.

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[SandyW]

I would try some dodge/burning to seperate the various mountains a bit more.

 

[jeffnles1]

You said your daughter liked the layers of the mountains. The foreground does little in this photo to accentuate those layers. I played around for about 5 minutes with your photo but didn't want to mess with your work too much. I liked a 16X9 crop aspect ratio better because of the width to height accentuated the layers. I also darkened the sky and added a little contrast there to bring out some texture in the clouds. The bright area in the lower left corner I darkened a little then brightened up the remaining foreground so it wasn't so much in shadows.
However, what I like and what you like may well be very different. I would offer that you may want to try a 16X9 type aspect ratio and see if that brings out the feeling of the layers of mountains the way you want.

 

[Palouse]

DXO-PL5: standard preset with some clear view dialed in; weak grad filter on the sky.

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[Wink Jones]

Cropped and some work with masking in LR.

You could have dropped your shutter speed quite a bit and had a lower ISO with minimal noise.

View attachment 39996

You are absolutely correct. It had been a rainy day when I shot some flowers earlier and I failed to remember to check my ISO when I got out of the car to take a quick shot for my daughter. This was done in less than a minute from my daughter pulling over and being back on the road. I should have taken the time to follow my own mental checklist.

Thank you.

 

[Wink Jones]

I would try some dodge/burning to seperate the various mountains a bit more.

I will try that,

Thank you.

 

[Wink Jones]

You said your daughter liked the layers of the mountains. The foreground does little in this photo to accentuate those layers. I played around for about 5 minutes with your photo but didn't want to mess with your work too much. I liked a 16X9 crop aspect ratio better because of the width to height accentuated the layers. I also darkened the sky and added a little contrast there to bring out some texture in the clouds. The bright area in the lower left corner I darkened a little then brightened up the remaining foreground so it wasn't so much in shadows.
However, what I like and what you like may well be very different. I would offer that you may want to try a 16X9 type aspect ratio and see if that brings out the feeling of the layers of mountains the way you want.

Excellent thoughts and I will play with your suggestions in the morning. I have taken some landscapes I am really fond of, this one just does not move me much, but my daughter was so excited I am going to work on it until it is at least worthy of giving her a print of.

Thank you for your time and effort.

 

[Wink Jones]

DXO-PL5: standard preset with some clear view dialed in; weak grad filter on the sky.

View attachment 40015

Thank you, Palouse.

 

[Wink Jones]

You said your daughter liked the layers of the mountains. The foreground does little in this photo to accentuate those layers. I played around for about 5 minutes with your photo but didn't want to mess with your work too much. I liked a 16X9 crop aspect ratio better because of the width to height accentuated the layers. I also darkened the sky and added a little contrast there to bring out some texture in the clouds. The bright area in the lower left corner I darkened a little then brightened up the remaining foreground so it wasn't so much in shadows.
However, what I like and what you like may well be very different. I would offer that you may want to try a 16X9 type aspect ratio and see if that brings out the feeling of the layers of mountains the way you want.

I liked your suggestions and I think I am much happier with this effort:

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[jeffnles1]

I liked your suggestions and I think I am much happier with this effort:

View attachment 40046

I like it. I like how the layers in the clouds kind of mirror the layers in the mountains. Hope your daughter likes it too.

 

[Wink Jones]

Whew! I spent about an hour tweaking this. Thank goodness for the new masking ability in LR. They have really made things so much easier.

 

[Anjin San]

I liked your suggestions and I think I am much happier with this effort:

View attachment 40046

Much better…although I would still either tone the foreground bushes down a bit and then the overall exposure up a bit…or bring up the exposure up a bit for the more distant mountain layers. It depends on what you want to be the center of attention…the lower left brown and the bright green bush 1/4 of the way from the left draw my attention first, followed by the bare dirt (/) area just left and below center, then the distant series of ranges. I would probably do another version trying to bring up the distant layers a bit and then see whether you…or your daughter…liked one or the other better. Wouldn't mess with the sky/clouds much…they add nice drama.

 

[Wink Jones]

I will play some more this afternoon. I had a LOT of trouble with the distant mountains, anything I did tended to blow them out or obscure them with the smog. I found them very touchy.

I will run the results past my daughter. She was once a very good photographer in her own right before she apprenticed to a wedding photographer and completely overloaded on what that meant in terms of work. She went from ecstatic about being one of the five chosen from dozens applying to basically quitting photography after five or six weddings. According to her the head photographer was charging 50k+ for a wedding and did thousands of shots with four to five assistants and video with another couple. The weddings they were shooting were often over 1 million dollars. Insanity by my pocket book...

 

[Anjin San]

I will play some more this afternoon. I had a LOT of trouble with the distant mountains, anything I did tended to blow them out or obscure them with the smog. I found them very touchy.

I will run the results past my daughter. She was once a very good photographer in her own right before she apprenticed to a wedding photographer and completely overloaded on what that meant in terms of work. She went from ecstatic about being one of the five chosen from dozens applying to basically quitting photography after five or six weddings. According to her the head photographer was charging 50k+ for a wedding and did thousands of shots with four to five assistants and video with another couple. The weddings they were shooting were often over 1 million dollars. Insanity by my pocket book...

Dehaze slider and a mask maybe?