The first time I got a sky like this - quite similar to what I know from prints of scottish seascapes. A700 was set on a tripod, in front of the Tamron 11-18 I used a chinese replica of a cokin nd grad and later on heavily massaged the raw file in lightzone. Exposing to the right, the raw file was really bland, so without setting a new black point it would have been bleak and colorless. See the thumbnail from the raw here for comparison:



Markus

very dramatic. I don't know enough about PP to understand what you did but it sure worked

Yeah, me too

Step by step:

Opening in lightzone, the raw file looks like this:



Note that despite of all settings to normal it already looks darker then the thumbnail which was extracted from the raw file itself and which reflects the DRO- settings of the A700.



In the next step the sky is carefully darkened. Note the dotted line that indicates a lightzone region, and the feather zone between the outer and inner lines



Now the saturation is increased in two consecutive, identical steps. I tried two steps as I had the feeling that doing it in one large step results in clipping, but I still have to do some test to prove this theory. Anyway, the result is pleasing



A first 'relight' step creates more differentiation in the highlights and works out the details. opening the shadows is substantially reduced from the default, in the sky I want the dark areas to remain dark.



The second 'relight' step opens up the shadows in the hills a tiny bit and differentiates the structures in the meadows. Again a lightzone region is used to restrict the effect to the land.



The spot tool finalizes the treatment of the image by removing a dark blotch in the sky. Local contrast enhancement by large radius/small strength unsharp masking and two separate sharpening steps for dark and light areas makes the image ready for conversion to jpeg. All those steps are saved without change to the raw file in a lightzone jpeg file with contains the recipes as jpeg comments. That's it

Markus

I'll have to see if I can do that sort of thing is LR and ACDSEE (got the demos)

Thanks Markus. I think I got the idea and will try to make the same on CS3. The only thing that remains is to find such a sky these days (it is completely and absolutely cloudless).

Nice shot. There was similar sky few days ago here, but unfortunately I had work and no time to get camera and go shooting. Just taken few photos in front of my house. Nothing interesting though. This is only one worth sharing. I still didn't decided if its good enough to put it in gallery No fancy PP was applied. Just exposure and saturation correction. Oh, and noise reduction too. I didn't noticed ISO 400 being set from previous shooting

Great shot too!

Rarely seen such understatement. Gorgeous colors, even without massaging the file - you are a lucky man!

Regards - Markus

Thanks! Since I got my a200 I usually take 30-50 photos to choose 2-3 of them later. Because of that I've taken more pictures with it in a month than I've taken with my previous camera in 1.5 year I think I'll put this one in gallery after getting back home today.

I think that's a pretty common success rate, something like 5-10%. The only problem is the preview work when shooting only raw. For a while I shot raw+jpeg, but this becomes a serious disk space problem if you are not really strict on sorting out and deleting. Anyhow, overcoming the old film-days habit of taking only one shot of a scenery is really helpful to increase the number of keepers.

But I have to admit I admire the great ones in photography early last century. They probably did not shoot 20 or so from one scene and still created wonderful work.

Regards - Markus

I'm shooting RAW only and yes, preview is sometimes problematic. What I don't like is that a200 doesn't seem to have 100% coverage when reviewing shots on LCD. Other problem I'm experiencing is that exposure seen on LCD sometimes doesn't match what you see on computer later, but that one can be easily corrected when processing image. Colors are usually same when using Image Data Converter as RAW processing software. On ACR on the other hand colors get heavily undersaturated (on default settings) and sharpness is lost (either ACR is doing something to image that makes it blurry or Sony IDC does some kind of pre-sharpening on RAW files).


There are still some masters that get one or two shots of scene and are doing awesome work. Beginners like me will probably never get that good or it will take ages

FYI: I uploaded my above sky shot to my gallery, just mirrored it horizontally as suggested by friend photographer.

One thing you might want to do, when posting to this group, is reduce the size of your final image. Because of the way phpBB handles images, apparently, I was getting it with about the rightmost 20% cropped off, and had to zoom Firefox out to full-screen size to see the whole image. (Before doing that, I was all set to reply to you asking why on earth you'd chosen to crop the right part of the image off...)