Lighting? setting? contrast? lens? what is it?

[Arnor]

Duffy,

Can you post your a and b curve changes? I've never used LAB, always use RGB, but I'm eager to learn how you do it:)

Best regards,

[Duffy Pratt]

Armor:

First convert to LAB. Then open curves adjustment layer The A channel covers green/magenta. The B channel covers blue/yellow. Negative numbers are cool. Positive numbers are warm. Zero is neutral.

For this, all I did was move the endpoints in a bunch - to like -70 and 70. The line stays completely straight, and it still intersects 0,0. This overdid the change, so I dialed back the opacity to taste, I think somewhere around 70%.

For an intro to LAB, I recommend looking at the first 5 chapters of The Canyon Conundrum by Dan Margulis. It's a book devoted entirely to LAB, and its really good. Or you could look
here for some very good summaries of what is covered.

Hope this helps.

Duffy

[DarkHorse]

thank you all for your input,

johnp

[Arnor]

Duffy,

Thanks:)

Best regards,

[Donb10]

John:

The answer to your original post is "Yes". Good photographs are all of those things. Not all photos you take will be great because one or more of the factors will be missing. As a general rule, you will find that in the long run you will get better results with the better quality lens. However, nothing can compensate for proper camera setting and technique. Post processing is another major factor but it secondary to the former. As you proceed you will find that there are several different ways in Adobe Photoshop to achieve the same results. Some people like different methods than others.

I took your photo of the sunset and used a levels ajdustment layer to start with. I opened each color and adjusted them individually. I added a hue and saturation adjustment layer and increased the saturation. To increase the contrast I used an action that I made using the High Pass filter.

As you can tell from the other posts, different people use different approaches to accomplish what they think looks best.

Take care and good luck...........

[davil78]

THose edited pics look great. How long does it typically take to do that?

[DarkHorse]

Thanks, im going out today and ill stop and look for a book, on PS, or CR2

[Duffy Pratt]

Originally Posted by davil78

THose edited pics look great. How long does it typically take to do that?

Can't speak for the others, of course. My edit took about 2 minutes.

Duffy