* Wednesday C&C "No Theme" Thread #856 / Revived #076 on 2024 09 11 *

These are all mine, don't even think about it.😀

Please do not edit

It's a pity the left corner of the eggs is missing. I feel the missing eggs completing the egg display would have more impact in telling the "These are all mine..." story.

The car is a bit of a distraction. Either cloning it out or a gradient blur to blur it significantly more will help highlight the eggs and bird more.

The following is a wall from one of the many art installations on Naoshima. In one village, complete old houses scattered around the town are preserved and turned into works of art. The Art House project. The wall is in the Ishibashi family home site. Compare it with MikePDX's second rust image.

As I showed earlier, ETTR would have helped immensely in reducing the visible noise.

Fwiw, I straightened and denoised and sharpened as much as I dare to push it using Topaz Denoise AI. Photoshop's denoising outputted a far too grainy sky with considerable artefacts in the foliage on the left which are too noticeable for my liking.

I used ACR and Photoshop Elements for some tonal adjustments which work better for me. The screen really needed a separate shot appropriately exposed to be inserted into the final image.

If I had a nearly noiseless raw file which ETTR would have provided the image would have cleaned up much more.

Anyway, just some food for thought 😊

When I posted this photo I had just returned from a hot and disappointing day walking up and down hills between galleries (some of which turned out to be closed or had specific, previously unannounced closures of some exhibits for photography) on Naoshima. I quite like the photo I posted but it wasn't what I had been looking forward to shooting when I set out.

That's a very interesting comparison. Curiously, your photo is almost as if you were looking at mine through a window.

One of the things I'm coming to learn about abstract photos is to look at them from all angles with an open mind. My shot is of a steel pier in a boat basin. It originally presented itself as seen below. But once I rotated it, it became a mountain scene, maybe in China. Here is a similar shot to the unedited original:

I'm not sure these came out very well, I shot this on my phone and edited in lightroom on my phone.
The tiny screen makes this very difficult for me.

You can edit.

The combination of the photo and the title and the gull's accusatory expression made me smile. The molded design does indeed look like 100 eggs rowed up and I began to follow your storyline and imagine the gull was fooled by them. It's a cute shot with a great little story.

Lovely rainbow and the rainbow IS the story and the subject here. I really like the concept of black and white for a rainbow, something I've never tried and am now asking myself why I have never thought of it. Like many phone images, it is noisy, and the noise multiplies when you do any editing on them. A dose of noise removal might help.

I already liked the original photo (and the story).
Good angle resulting in a classic and harmonious symmetrical composition.
The lighting of the windows adds a lot.

And then Dan made the image pop some more.

One last touch is missing: the sky, which has been replaced quite well, should at least be as bright as the reflection in the swimming pool.
I notice that we are getting further and further away from real photography.
Does the moment captured with the camera have anything to do with reality?
What is this forum actually about?

The explanation in the op is very clear to me.

But creativity in Photoshop is much more difficult than in photography.
What isn't there in the photo could probably only be added in Photoshop by very talented painters. Because they have a feeling for light and shadow, color moods and reflections.
Photographers usually lack the eye for this, which I see again and again in this forum.

All the original and edited images in this thread are within the scope described in the op.

Just post the type of images you are interested in within the op's scope just like everyone does.

I think I can comment on every post in this forum.
It's about whether whatever you do at least corresponds to human perception.
Without contradictory elements, the spectrum is very broad.
Then, of course, artistic freedom comes into play...

This is where I and I suspect some others disagree, at least to some extent.

If the intention for a final image is a close as possible documentary representation of the scene then yes I totally agree with you that the final image on the creator's screen should correspond to their perception of the scene when the photo was taken.

If the intention is not a documentary representation of the scene then just about anything goes.

Ditto on the originality of a B&W rainbow: it becomes a halo of sorts.

Noise seldom bothers me.
Especially in a B&W image, I tend to just think of it as “grain” and that turns a defect into an artistic asset.
There are exceptions of course.

I like the colour version much more but to highlight the rainbow more, maybe a combination of the 2 images?

I used a black to white gradient on a layer mask with the 2 images stacked on top of each other.