this is a totally unedited photo

How many totally unedited photos are there?
this photo is one of a series of photos I took at the time, one is recently posted in landscapes & seascapes
https://flic.kr/p/MU6TXR
I came to this one, it caught my eye and looked towards processing it as usual. I found I like it in its pristine original unprocessed condition.
the one below, totally unedited

So what do you think?
Is it fine as is, does it need processing, how would you post process it?
I must say I like my photos in as pristine condition as possible. In keeping w my main photography motto "Keep it simple stupid"

I liked the foreground trees as a dark silhouette for the early morning sunrise

Lake Tahoe Sunrise by Coast, on Flickr

Edited by Coast - 01 February 2017 at 07:16

Fran: Sorry I did not post process it

Hmmm, ISWYM. Looking at the picture, I also wanted to crop it on the rhs - maybe to the centre of the tree, but I tried doing that and it doesn't work. I was also tempted to crop much more heavily to make the centre piece of water more obviously vignetted by the main trees, and to remove the sky just above the centre tree. But while this does work (to me!) it becomes a different picture than the one you took, and possibly not as good.

I would change the colours, though, as they look too insipid for me. I'm not normally one for overly vivid colours, but I've seen a lot of strong sunrise/sunset colours and this isn't enough for me.

On my copy of your picture, using the basic Sony PM, I 'improved' the picture (to my taste!) by the following changes to the tone curve:
1. Pull the RGB top corner to the left to maximise the brightness
2. pull the RGB slider down hard in the left middle to make the colours stronger and more moody
3. Lift the blue slider in the middle to make the lake bluer and darken the far shore slightly (to cut the haze without pushing it full black)
4. Lastly, pulled the saturation up 30-40% to bring out the colours.

I tend to do this myself in camera rather than in pp, altering the WB and exposure compensation to achieve a quite similar result. I do like the EVF on the A58! but I have found that the AWB often ruins moody sunset/sunrise pics and a little experimentation with manual WB and exposure is almost always worthwhile. And I take mostly jpegs, which means it is more difficult to pull things around afterward.

"Straight out of the camera" is a better designation than "totally unedited", as no JPEG is "unedited", for the reason explained by Fran. Therefore there's very many "totally unedited photos" out there. It's just that they are raw files and can't be viewed without a conversion.

Straight out of the camera JPEGs got better for Sony cameras in the recent years. However before that it was usually necessary to use the raw files to get a better version of the photo.

Hi Josef!
Here are my 2c: Silhouette images usually do not need much of postprocessing (or no PP at all). E.g., there are no shadows or lights to be recovered, quite the contrary: attempts at postprocessing in most cases never look as good as the unprocessed images, in my experience.

Just view them and enjoy!
All the best, Harald

Hi, again, Coast.
Yes, I realise you wanted comments on PP, but I feel framing is part of that too. I also think your picture, which is almost but not quite a silhouette, does raise questions which I ask myself when taking pictures near dusk or dawn.

1) Do low-saturation pics work, or should they be either strongly coloured or full mono?

A: Yes, they can work. I often take scenic views with little colour in them, and often take both mono and colour images, and the views with just a little colour in them do work. But,


2) How important is colour to this picture? Is the scene essentially mono, with some colour added to make it less stark, or is it essentially a colour picture? Because IME mono and colour pics need different composition to work well.

A: I feel that without the colour element, scenes kind of have to obey the rules of mono. That is, they either need a sparse, almost geometric, quality to have impact in silhuoette, or else they need a strong textural quality, like sun/moonlight on waves, sand, etc.
Thus, I feel that if the picture had one tree, perhaps in vertical format, this would work as a mono picture, but as it is, the tree-line has a ragged non-geometric feel to it (to me) which doesn;t quite work as mono.
Ther is also the issue that the distant shore is not full black, and if it is made full black it muddles up the tree silhouette, so high-contrast mono doesn't really work for me here, and I feel colour is an imortant aspect of the picture.

3) If it is a colour picture, the 'rules' are much relaxed due to the extra visual interest gained, and the gredations of hue and saturation near the horizon as dawn and dusk are a good source. But how saturated do they need to be?

A: This must be a matter of personal preferance, and clearly there is room for both highly-saturated dawn/dusk images and more subtle ones. But I feel there isn't enough colour in this as presented to make this work, for me, hence my comments before.

Anyway, glad you shared this pic and asked for comments. I always enjoy this kind of critique as it definitely prompts the kind of questions I ask myself when trying to capture a view (often unsuccesfully).

Thanks addy landzaat; I always admire how you can get straight to the heart of the subject with the correct analysis.

Miranda F; thanks, but I think the discussion was getting a little complex.

Can a photo, that has Zero post processing, including crop, be a quality photograph?

So I took recommendations from above and I pp'd not the same photo but the one just prior to it. I said I took a series at the time. I believe I took over 500 total, including continuous fast frames during the week. The one above snapped at 6:04 am this one at 6:03. They should be similar to a point.

This photo I post processed

Lake Tahoe, Sunrise to Sunset Sept. 2016 by Coast, on Flickr

To me the non edited having been there is a more true, real depiction of the Time and Place

Edited by Coast - 01 February 2017 at 07:20