Springtime in Willamette Valley

I really love riding my bike to this field. It’s very peaceful and beautiful. I was practicing ICM techniques. I liked how this one turned out because the front tree is the most prominent, I love how its branches stand out but I like the pines in the background marching up the hills, with just a tad of sky.

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Technical Details

Is this a composite: No
Nikon D3400
300mm
1/15
f/32
ISO 400
Just converted to jpg

Vanessa this ICM came out really well. It has a recognizable subject, but with a very painterly look. It looks like a rainy or foggy day so the high key (bright) processing creates a very delicate look too. I also like the background pines, they help structure the composition.

I think you could place more emphasis on the yellow tree with a couple tweaks. The white tree on the left edge draws too much attention away from the center. I would suggest either cropping it away, or darkening it down. I might also slightly reduce the saturation and brightness of the green grass, it would also help place more attention on the yellow tree. But these are minor tweaks, overall this image is very nicely done.

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Looks like a great place to ride a bike Vanessa. This is rather painterly with just enough blur but not too much. I would suggest cropping out the white bush on the left as well as the sky in the ULC. This places the yellow tree, the main subject in a better place on the canvas and eliminates those other two distractions. The entire scene is muted and soft except for the foreground grass which is too saturated grabbing the eye so may tone down the grass a little bit. There is also a very small white spot just above the grass about a third of the way in from the right that be cloned out. Otherwise, I really like what you got with this image.

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Thanks, Ed, I’m glad you like it! I brought down the saturation and did a slight crop of both the tree and grass, I can’t just desaturate the grass alone, so does it take away from the tre


e?

Hi David, I did a bit of a crop and brought the saturation down. I didn’t crop out the little bit of sky, because then it would take away the line of the hills. What do you think?

I would not recommend cropping the grass away, just de-saturating it. I use Lightroom or ACR for processing, and you can use local adjustment tools such as the brush, graduated filter or radial filter where you can reduce saturation in a specific area that you target. Or because the grass is the only green here, you could use the LR HSL panel to reduce green saturation, which would mostly affect just the grass.

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@Ed_McGuirk Actually I have Lightroom but it’s on an iPad and doesn’t have a brush tool or anything to be able to do locally. What is the HSL? I might have that and could at least use that. I agree about the grass, not cropping it, but I was thinking if there was less to deal with it would help! :slight_smile:

The Hue, Saturation, Luminosity panel. It lets you adjust any of these three things by color range.

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Thanks @Ed_McGuirk , I can adjust hue, saturation and luminosity but I don’t have the local adjustment tools. They don’t have that feature on the iPad version. Which is why it’s so important that I do my best at getting as much right as possible in my camera and with the spring greens I don’t know if I could have?

This turns out to be a very nice ICM image.
Those suggestions @Ed_McGuirk and @David_Haynes gave you really help the composition.

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Is this the version of Lightroom Mobile that you are using ? See below.

If that is so , then it appears that local adjustment functionality exists in what they call Selective Edits. Looks like the same tools mentioned above.

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/using/edit-photos-mobile-ios.html

Hi @Ed_McGuirk thanks for looking into that for me. But, I don’t have that version. I got the cheapest one because I only needed Lightroom but they have so many options that it’s confusing! And realized after the fact that it really doesn’t do a whole lot more than what I had before! I need to look again at their different plans, specifically this one that you found… Thank you for your help!