Home, Sweet Home!
by NikonJeb

Comment by xianart:
or there's the rather cheap b/w with colour flag - a bit cliche, but sometimes that works...

Home, Sweet Home!
by NikonJeb

Comment by xianart:
ewll, it's obvious that mary and i think similarly! i ran this through alien skins cross process e100, but to get a similar result you could do a high pass layer, contrast, and hue/sat bumping up red. then i did a gradient layer for the vignette, and after flattening a gaussian blur layer. both the gradient and blur are masked to choose only the areas i wanted affected.

it's a great image, but i agree with the flatness comments. t just mneeds a little oomph to get it going.

Home, Sweet Home!
by NikonJeb

Comment by quiet_observation:
this was a 1 minute bad edit trying to increase the contrast a bit and make the flag pop out. A photoshop guru would be able to do a lot better.

Home, Sweet Home!
by NikonJeb

Comment by mist:
I agree with Kelly and Julianne. I didn't get around to voting on this challenge, but I think this one would have picked up a 5 or 6 from me.

It meets the challenge and is detailed and, I think, well composed, but the flat lighting and general murkiness of it does not make it stand out as a photo. It's a funny one, because the challenge "harsh environments" suggests darkness etc., but what you want to avoid is a drab photograph that lacks bite, unfortunately I think that's what has happened here.

Two possible alternatives to it could be - try taking the shot at a different time of day to see what difference lighting conditions make, or play around with curves to see if a particular bit of post processing alters the lighting enough to make the house stand out a bit more - with all that grey it's going to be tricky, though.

Home, Sweet Home!
by NikonJeb

Comment by klstover:
I gave it a 6 as well, and my main reason was also that it seemed "flat". I think that if this had been a basic editing challenge this photo would have been great. I mean, it's a good subject that fits the challenge nicely, the composition is great, and I think overall it is a good photo! But in advanced editing, and now in the new expert editing, I think generally the voter is going to look for a photo that has more "wow factor" or "impact". Maybe if the house had been colored a different color (which I'm assuming could theoretically (if difficultly) be done in expert editing)... but then it wouldn't be as drab looking.. so you're kind of in a bind as to what to do. I do remember thinking as I voted that the drab feeling definitely suited the subject matter... so I don't really have anything to suggest. Hope this helps a little bit anyway.

Home, Sweet Home!
by NikonJeb

Comment by JuliBoc:
You captured an amazing scene here. This is a harsh environment for sure. What really gets to me in this image are the flags decorating the front of the house. There is still some life and joy in this pitiful shambles of a home.

I gave this a 6, because the image seems to be a little flat. I don't know if you used HDR or some expert editing techniques to create this effect deliberately, but this sometimes happens to my pictures when I use Shadows/Highlights. I find that if I use Exposure after s/h, and tweak offset and/or gamma ever so slightly, the photo pops back to life. Also,I think saturating red a little more would bring some color to the brown areas without destroying the harshness of the scene.

This scored quite well, considering nobody has quite figured out what to make of these Expert rules. Too bad SkyNavada didn't give you that 8 he thought you deserved. And a FAV! Woohoo.

Goggomobil
by NikonJeb

Comment by faery:
I like this choice of subject...I just think that the picture in general could have done with a bit of warming up in processing...less blown out white on the right in the sticks.

Goggomobil
by NikonJeb

Comment by gjumi:
7

Home, Sweet Home!
by NikonJeb

Comment by bvlindalou:
this is a real fix-r-upper....at least they are patriotic

Goggomobil
by NikonJeb

Comment by deblur:
too much contrast