Learning...slowly - PP/retouching

I don't do much PP on my images as a general rule. However, hanging around here has piqued my interest, so I tried something tonight.

Here is the original, out of the camera.
http://backup.cambridgeincolour.com/...riginal024.jpg

Then I cropped with a twist to "level" the curving shoreline. I then selected the lake and pulled the brightness and contrast. Then I selected the houses and shoreline and twiddled the brightness and contrast. Last I selected the sky and clouds and pulled the curves just a bit.
http://backup.cambridgeincolour.com/...shopped024.jpg

I'm not really happy with it, but it is not bad for a first try at selective PP.

C&C please

Pops

Hi,
Something more dramatique with levels and lasso.

https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/fo...p;d=1265138183
All the best
Radu Dinu

Interesting approach, Radu. I'm going to play some more with the selective PP.

Pops

Here's what I've come up in lightroom:
http://backup.cambridgeincolour.com/...ginal024-2.jpg

I've cranked up exposure, then added some fill light to bring out detail in trees, increased brightness and contrast to compensate for fill light, recovered some highlights and finally I shifted luminance and saturation of oranges in HSL panel.

BTW this is my first post, I've been looking for a great place like this since I got my first dslr month ago! :)

I like that. The only further processing I'd do is bring up the darkness and contrast of the middle bank of clouds to more closely match what my eye saw that day. The middle layer of clouds were quite dark, but had quite a bit of detail to see.

To tell the truth, I had almost forgotten this post. I'm glad you brought it up. I need to go back and play with that one a bit more. ;)

Pops

Since everybody is doing it, I wanna be cool too!
http://i47.tinypic.com/e9uqvl.jpg
I did this entirely with photoshop curves - I feel it gives me more control over brightness across the image. I think I may have gone a little heavy on the dark areas, as there is an unnatural gradient between the trees and the cloud opening. I just didn't know how to make the houses bright enough while keeping the sky properly exposed. I also went a little heavy on the artificial vignetting.

Cool! :D

Pops