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Sorry for the vague description, took this in a monastery on a hilltop. For some reason the picture does not pop and looks decidely normal. What could I have done differently?



Conditions: Sunny, indoors, took photo from in the shade
Settings: No flash, Indoor preset white balance

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Try different angles? Try changing to black and white, even get down at a low angle.
These might make a difference?

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Ed


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the problem I see, is that the whole scene lacks a bit of color though to make the most out of it I think an even wider angle and a perspective from a low angle would have been better.

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The colour is there but the light colours are too light and the dark colours too dark giving high contrast and low colour. I tweaked the histogram by applying "Midtone Compression" which shifts these very light and very dark colours more towards the middle. Because this also causes an overall loss of contrast I then increased contrast again.

Since there is no better way of showing you what I mean than, well... showing you what I mean I have posted the result here assuming you wouldn't mind. If you do it's easily removed.



This is a result of only adjusting relative lightness in the photo. No changes to colour settings like white balance, saturation or hue were made. Just the two I described above. I hope you like it.

Ben
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Like some of the others have said I might have tried a lower angle. Other than that I'm not quite sure.

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Nice edit Ben. I think what breaks the original photo is the "whiteness" of the scene. Sure, it could work in other scenes but in this case I think it makes it a little too clinical.

edit: In this instance though, instead of playing with midtones levels you could just bump the saturation and you'll get a similar result to what Ben got. Main difference is the histogram of the saturated image looks a bit more toothy. Just adding this here in case you don't have software that can modify midtones.

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