help with editing snow covered landscape

[shellz090]

As the snow has fallen like many other I went out with my camera at the weekend, this is the first snow covered landscape ive taken and looking for a bit of advice on how to edit it.

I shot in raw and this is what ive come up with, are there any other ways in which I could improve it? Ive only very recently started shooting raw to try help with my editing skills.

Any help would be great!


fields in the show 2 (1 of 1) by shellz090, on Flickr

 

[Martyn D]

It's difficult at the moment as skies are very bland and you need something to catch the eye, unfortunately my eye seems to be drawn to the telegraph poles, you'll need to adjust the white balance a bit as the camera turns white snow into a more grey'ish snow, theres prob not a lot more you can do to that photo.
I'm far from an expert, hopefully more knowledgable members will add more to help.

 

[Pookeyhead]

It's all about lighting. There's way too much emphasis on post processing these days, but teh fact is, great photography needs great lighting, and this scene just doesn't have great lighting. It's flat and dull. That's not to say it's a bad photo. It certainly makes me feel cold, and captures the bitter cold nicely. There's just nothing of any great interest in it.

Seriously though... it's not about what you do to images after you've taken them that makes them great. What do you think we all did when we shot on film and had no computers?

A little punch wouldn't go a miss though. It's a little under exposed too.

See that space on the right of the histogram? That's headroom you have in teh highlights. You can adjust it now, post process by moving the highlight slider back to where the information starts.

..and as you can see it brightens things up a bit.

You could do this in camera though. Snow will almost always force the camera to under exposed slightly, and you should check your histogram to see, as looking at the image on the preview screen really is useless as a guide.

You should always expose to make full use of the headroom you have by using the histogram, as this way you get to use the full dynamic range of the camera and this helps with shadow detail. Just watch you don't over exposed, because losing highlights is even worse, especially if you have lots of small bright highlights, as these are sometimes tricky to see on the histogram.

 

[shellz090]

It's all about lighting. There's way too much emphasis on post processing these days, but teh fact is, great photography needs great lighting, and this scene just doesn't have great lighting. It's flat and dull. That's not to say it's a bad photo. It certainly makes me feel cold, and captures the bitter cold nicely. There's just nothing of any great interest in it.

Seriously though... it's not about what you do to images after you've taken them that makes them great. What do you think we all did when we shot on film and had no computers?

A little punch wouldn't go a miss though. It's a little under exposed too.

See that space on the right of the histogram? That's headroom you have in teh highlights. You can adjust it now, post process by moving the highlight slider back to where the information starts.

..and as you can see it brightens things up a bit.

You could do this in camera though. Snow will almost always force the camera to under exposed slightly, and you should check your histogram to see, as looking at the image on the preview screen really is useless as a guide.

You should always expose to make full use of the headroom you have by using the histogram, as this way you get to use the full dynamic range of the camera and this helps with shadow detail. Just watch you don't over exposed, because losing highlights is even worse, especially if you have lots of small bright highlights, as these are sometimes tricky to see on the histogram.

Thanks alot for your reply, I understand completly about the lighting, it was a dark overcast snowy saturday afternoon but it was my only chance to get out with the camera this weekend so I tried to make do Ill take another look at the image with the tips youve provided and remeber what you have said next time im out in the snow with my camera! thanks again!

 

[garryknight]

It's got a blue colour cast. There's lots of help with removing it in this search.