Hi Caleb! Greetings from the Critique Club, and welcome to DPC :)
Nice entry, not bad for your first challenge :) Pretty sunset, and the silhouettes provide a good point of focus for the viewer.
In order to make an entry like this stand out, you need to think very carefully about the composition of it. This one is nice, and follows the rule of thirds, but all those tree silhouettes together look quite busy. I would've been tempted to try variations with either standing much further away and getting a lot more sky, or much closer to the people and getting rid of a lot of the trees, to see which one works better.
In terms of the post-processing: the main problems I can see with the picture are the noise and oversharpening. The noise is unsurprising since you were shooting at ISO1600 (you can see it very clearly in the top right corner), but also isn't the end of the world, since it's easily removable in pp - the two most commonly used programs for this are Neat Image and Noise Ninja. For the sharpening (you can see sharpening halos in the top right around the branches, and also around the silhouettes, that means you've gone a bit too far) - it's well worth getting familiar with the Photoshop 'Unsharp Mask' filter - it gies you a lot more control over the type and amount of sharpening you're applying than an auto sharpness setting does. There's a tutorial here. Of course, the best way to reduce the amount of sharpening you need is to be very careful about exactly where in the picture your camera focuses, but you'll always need some anyway just to make the picture pop a bit. Oh, also, do your noise reduction before you do any sharpening on the picture, since sharpening will amplify any noise present.
Anyway, hope that helps, and hope to see you submitting to more challenges soon :) |
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