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Quote:Who are the judge(s) for this challenge? Is it just you Conrad?
No, I will be joined in the judging by the lovely Jacqueline, better known on here as webjam - for two reasons: two heads are better than one, and she's better at digital imaging than I am, and has a more critical eye. (Well, both of them are, actually.)
Sorry I'm a bit late, but here's the final verdict:
This was more difficult than I expected - both the challenge and the judging!
Fortunately I had some help from my wife, Jacqueline, better known on here as webjam. Her help in identifying flaws in conversions and post processing work proved invaluable.
The challenge was more difficult than I thought - in fact, even my own effort from a few weeks back is far from perfect, in my own humble opinion. Thing is that with this image, one feels that one has to balance making Ashley look good with making her surroundings look good. The brickwork of the old fort seems too good a decor to ignore in the post processing. Although we found that concentrating on one or the other can also give very interesting and unexpectedly good results.
But Ashley was the subject of the photo, and making her look good was the most important thing to do. So any entries that seemed technically sound, but didn't make the dog look good enough, were out. Some even looked like very good conversions, initially, but we found that in some Ashley looked too 'cold' and 'flat' (colourwise and contrastwise), while she has very warm colours and lots of contrast in her fur, and some even made her look downright dirty (especially the whites in her fur, which are very difficult to get right).
A few examples of entries that had us in doubt for a while, and came very close:
Entry no. 16 by Paul Sutton looks like a techically sound conversion, with some very good post processing. He thought of contrast, left the shadow in, made the rusty doors look good - almost all of it made a very good impression, but Ashley's fur tones aren't warm enough to our liking - we feel that if you're going to use colour (which, of course isn't necessary, in view of a few good mono conversions), then at least Ashley's rich fur tones, which unfortunately aren't very obvious in the original RAW file, should look warm. But Paul does come very close to our ideal.
Cole had some very good entries (23-26), too. For a moment, we did suspect that his whites came close to being burnt out, but when we copied them to Photoshop and found that this wasn't the case, this put him back in the running. And Cole was at the top our shortlist for a while.
Some creative entries made us laugh: entry no. 27 by looboss, for instance: you certainly made Ashley the star, Luis, and that's a very creative use of the background! We had to laugh hard at Penny's interpretation of the word RAW, and at Nick's idea that the dog would have wanted to escape through the rusty doors (entry 61) - an honourable mention for you, Nick, it was a great idea and well executed!
And Barbara's idea that the whole thing, including the background, needed to be a lot sunnier and greener, also didn't go unnoticed - very creative, Barbara. And Geoff Peach (GPTek) had an interesting entry, just showing Ashley with a bit of wall, and an EPZ logo. Ashley looked quite good in this one, although we found the logo too distracting.
Mood, of course, was part of the considerations, too. Lots of technically very good images just didn't convey the kind of mood we were looking for. And some that did do that, had other problems, like somewhat too generous helpings of contrast or sharpening. (All just in our humble opinion, of course.) Entry no. 65 by Nigel Betteridge (Nigel_95) appealed to us a lot. The colours were warm enough, there was enough contrast, he did a good lens correction, and the overall mood of the image was good. But there was one entry that we just couldn't forget after having seen it, and that wasn't the most colourful one.
BTW, I've mentioned colours several times, but I do have to mention as well that we didn't reject mono conversions for being mono. There were good mono conversions, in fact, and we had a serious look at all of them. But somehow we often thought they lacked impact. This, by the way, also takes us to the subject of the winner - one that didn't initially catch our eye as a thumbnail, but that we kept coming back to once we'd opened it. The one that we looked at time and time again, was an unexpected choice, because we hadn't expected liking an entry with such a strong crop and almost without colour. After all, the arch and the rusty doors do look great. But this contestant was right, of course, in making Ashley the star of the show, and not only that, but it was done very beautifully. Have a look at entry no. 63 by Jay44. Despite the desaturation there's a good tonal range, and the other post processing actions added a lot of atmosphere.
So congratulations to Jay for creating the winning entry - a wonderfully pleasing and atmospheric image!
Please know that we would have loved to have awarded more prizes, but the rule was that were could only be one winner. I'm sure that if you look at our considerations, they should be considered to be subjective, but I'm afraid that this will always be the case when people judge other people's work - it's inescapable. Other judges might have picked other entries. Especially those that didn't know the subject as well as we do. Sorry!
We do appreciate all the work everyone put in, and would like to thank everyone for their entries. We would also like to commend those, including the winner, who took the time to explain how they reached their end results. This made it an interesting learning experience. I'm certainly going to use several ideas that these entries gave me in future uploads.
Thanks, everyone!
Conrad
This was more difficult than I expected - both the challenge and the judging!
Fortunately I had some help from my wife, Jacqueline, better known on here as webjam. Her help in identifying flaws in conversions and post processing work proved invaluable.
The challenge was more difficult than I thought - in fact, even my own effort from a few weeks back is far from perfect, in my own humble opinion. Thing is that with this image, one feels that one has to balance making Ashley look good with making her surroundings look good. The brickwork of the old fort seems too good a decor to ignore in the post processing. Although we found that concentrating on one or the other can also give very interesting and unexpectedly good results.
But Ashley was the subject of the photo, and making her look good was the most important thing to do. So any entries that seemed technically sound, but didn't make the dog look good enough, were out. Some even looked like very good conversions, initially, but we found that in some Ashley looked too 'cold' and 'flat' (colourwise and contrastwise), while she has very warm colours and lots of contrast in her fur, and some even made her look downright dirty (especially the whites in her fur, which are very difficult to get right).
A few examples of entries that had us in doubt for a while, and came very close:
Entry no. 16 by Paul Sutton looks like a techically sound conversion, with some very good post processing. He thought of contrast, left the shadow in, made the rusty doors look good - almost all of it made a very good impression, but Ashley's fur tones aren't warm enough to our liking - we feel that if you're going to use colour (which, of course isn't necessary, in view of a few good mono conversions), then at least Ashley's rich fur tones, which unfortunately aren't very obvious in the original RAW file, should look warm. But Paul does come very close to our ideal.
Cole had some very good entries (23-26), too. For a moment, we did suspect that his whites came close to being burnt out, but when we copied them to Photoshop and found that this wasn't the case, this put him back in the running. And Cole was at the top our shortlist for a while.
Some creative entries made us laugh: entry no. 27 by looboss, for instance: you certainly made Ashley the star, Luis, and that's a very creative use of the background! We had to laugh hard at Penny's interpretation of the word RAW, and at Nick's idea that the dog would have wanted to escape through the rusty doors (entry 61) - an honourable mention for you, Nick, it was a great idea and well executed!
And Barbara's idea that the whole thing, including the background, needed to be a lot sunnier and greener, also didn't go unnoticed - very creative, Barbara. And Geoff Peach (GPTek) had an interesting entry, just showing Ashley with a bit of wall, and an EPZ logo. Ashley looked quite good in this one, although we found the logo too distracting.
Mood, of course, was part of the considerations, too. Lots of technically very good images just didn't convey the kind of mood we were looking for. And some that did do that, had other problems, like somewhat too generous helpings of contrast or sharpening. (All just in our humble opinion, of course.) Entry no. 65 by Nigel Betteridge (Nigel_95) appealed to us a lot. The colours were warm enough, there was enough contrast, he did a good lens correction, and the overall mood of the image was good. But there was one entry that we just couldn't forget after having seen it, and that wasn't the most colourful one.
BTW, I've mentioned colours several times, but I do have to mention as well that we didn't reject mono conversions for being mono. There were good mono conversions, in fact, and we had a serious look at all of them. But somehow we often thought they lacked impact. This, by the way, also takes us to the subject of the winner - one that didn't initially catch our eye as a thumbnail, but that we kept coming back to once we'd opened it. The one that we looked at time and time again, was an unexpected choice, because we hadn't expected liking an entry with such a strong crop and almost without colour. After all, the arch and the rusty doors do look great. But this contestant was right, of course, in making Ashley the star of the show, and not only that, but it was done very beautifully. Have a look at entry no. 63 by Jay44. Despite the desaturation there's a good tonal range, and the other post processing actions added a lot of atmosphere.
So congratulations to Jay for creating the winning entry - a wonderfully pleasing and atmospheric image!
Please know that we would have loved to have awarded more prizes, but the rule was that were could only be one winner. I'm sure that if you look at our considerations, they should be considered to be subjective, but I'm afraid that this will always be the case when people judge other people's work - it's inescapable. Other judges might have picked other entries. Especially those that didn't know the subject as well as we do. Sorry!
We do appreciate all the work everyone put in, and would like to thank everyone for their entries. We would also like to commend those, including the winner, who took the time to explain how they reached their end results. This made it an interesting learning experience. I'm certainly going to use several ideas that these entries gave me in future uploads.
Thanks, everyone!
Conrad
Well done Jay.
Jules
Jules
