DT | L-HDR | Gimp2.9 | RT
My initial instinct is to crop this down to a square and add local contrast.
I did think to do something very similar but decided against it since itās been very heavily cropped already. I really need to get a bigger lense!
Nice moment to capture. 
I think there may be a colour profile issue with your images at Flickr and here at Pixls.us; they all appear over-saturated to me in both Firefox and Chrome. Iām running my OS and monitor in sRGB. It looks like your image is saved with an Adobe RGB compatible profile, but opening it in GIMP and converting to sRGB still shows the lighter tones of the water with a fairly nasty magenta cast.
Thx David. Itās something that had been bought up before and I think Pat is looking into it. Donāt forget that neither browsers offer default colour management, chrome offers none at all, while Firefox for desktop does but you have to configure it yourself.
I donāt use sRGB for my monitor profile, rather it uses its own custom calibration thanks to displaycal.
@Fotonut the water in all of your photos has a strong purple cast, including when downloaded as āoriginalā from flickr and viewed in a color-managed image viewer. If you donāt see it, re-check your calibration and profiling workflow. Also consider not using Adobe RGB unless youāre fine with most people seeing wrong colors (despite the purple water, which is a separate issue).
Thanks guys for your honest feedback, which is really appreciated!
It seems like an old issue which keeps cropping up time and time again has resurfaced. It doesnāt seem to matter how many tutorials one follows, there is always something that isnāt right. Iām absolutely confident my issues are not software related, more user related.
This whole photography lark has had some highlights over the past few years, but probably way more low lights, which makes this hobby bittersweet, more on the bitter side.
There are several components to my struggles, and my feeling is that if they couldnāt have been sorted over the past five years, theyāre not likely to be. Then feed into that how highly subjective photography is. One judge could look at your work and label it crap, while another, a masterpiece. Another key component is how much more patience I have to continue. At this point, to be honest, Iām exhausted. Exhausted, because it seems I have tried everything to make this hobby work, but like I said, the best I can do is some good results, but I end up mostly frustrated. Iām sure the aim of any hobby is to be enjoyable, which this, for the better part isnāt.
With all this in mind, I might take some time, seek the advice of family and friends and then make a decision about whether this is really the hobby for me, or if there is something else which I can find more enjoyment and less frustration from.
Like I said, Iām not blaming software, which is awesome. Itās my understanding and limited patience. I think, at least for me, that perhaps this is just one of those painful moments in life where you realise that what you have been doing as a hobby was not really for you after all.
Thanks again for your honest assesments guys!
Cheers.
Color management is always a 100% PITA, I wish there was a way around it (Iām open to suggestions!). I think part of having a creative hobby where you share the results is developing a thick skin (this is a general comment) and you are correct, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It is also way easier to look at others work and offer criticisms than it is to execute your own work; again, just the nature of the beast.
Iāve been photographing for 20 years and I always feel like Iām just getting to my āgoodā work and when I look back at my past work I canāt help but feel a tinge of shame; I think this is natural though, and means I have the drive to continue to improve my work. The challenge, for me at least (and I consider my work art) is to continually to my tooling to achieve the image I saw at the scene and visualized in my head. Iām not sure Iāll ever get there 100%.
Another thing to consider is that a lot of the photos youāll take will just be bad. When I shot film Iād aim to get 1 frame per roll that I thought was worth taking the time to print in the darkroom, and even now I feel that 1 in 36 is a very ambitious number.
I think youāve shared a number of wonderful shots with us! And I value your contributions here. I donāt think youāll ever fully put down your camera, even if you give it up as a āhobby,ā youāll still be shooting (have kids? A smartphone?) So if you want to get better, you can continue to do so even if your subject matter isnāt appealing to most people.
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Energy of context / light / hues / relation between elements / emotions and one-eyed flies
Today I was with a friendā¦ who has a rare terminal disease that progressively erases all features of being a self-sufficient human being while carrying an unimaginable amount of physical and psychological discomfort and suffering. Iām quite younger than he is, Iāve known him for some yearsā¦ with us were other people, among whom an old friend of him, 53 years of friendship - stated proudly. The saddest thing to witness is that ājustā because someone is unable to communicate as a ānormalā individual, within the standard fashion and common places, even the closest friend gave up on trying to establish other bridges, other channels for reachingā¦ and acts as if the guy already didnāt exist anymore.
So whatās this little personal drama to you? Well, only you can decide if you want to be friends with photography or not, and if so, honor that trust, practicing (unique level here: beginner) friendship beyond all the noise, beyond all the fakery, beyond common sense and shop-widows, beyond the fatuous little fireworks of recognition, beyond our own insecurities and voids, way beyond comfort zone, with the hunger of an inextinguishable curiosity, through the stamina and ever-wonder in each (re)discovery, tearing up the fears, piercing the heart of lifeā¦ you both could be kings of the world or two shepherds in a remote island but nobody, absolutely nobody in this universe will ever know what is your friend to you, but yourself, heāll knowā¦ through the way you practice friendship =)
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@Fotonut donāt give up! Weāre here to help. Letās identify the issues and take small steps to solve them. I felt the same way you feel many times, but then itās nice to discover that sometimes it was indeed a software bug, and other times I was just going too crazy with software when I should have taken more care while shooting.
In some other post you listed the software you use, and there were quite a few programs in your workflow, notably LHDR, and in addition to this youāre using AdobeRGB, so there is quite a high chance that youāll experience software bugs.
Less is more.
The first thing I recommend doing is cleaning your workflow slate. Open a photo and use only curves. If it looks bad - delete. I delete about 90% of my shots and the effects of that are nothing but good - less tagging, less processing, less disk space used, and the remaining photos are bound to have the most usable contents (best light, best composition, best expressions).
Secondly, stop saving to Adobe RGB. Does more damage than good. At least for now. Cutting down on the software in your workflow could also expose the culprit which causes the color oddities. My guess is LHDR.
Third, if possible, get someone to verify your monitor calibration. Maybe one of us from here lives near you?
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Thanks for your encouragement guys.
I think Morgan hit the nail on the head though regarding having someone close by to help. I live in a rural New Zealand town of 18,000. My nearest big city is 100kmās away. All the photographers I know locally either use Adobe products and/or are Windows users. Iām neither. Infact it would be fair to say that Iām idealogically opposed to the Adobe model, and my throughts around Microsoft (read Win 10) donāt change in that regard either.
Also against me is that Iām a very visual person. The best way for me to learn something is to actually watch it and then do it. Although I can read, I find it difficult and frustrating to learn using this method, particularly if the directions are more than a paragraph long and contains to many techincal terms or code. I just get lost with that stuff.
I have followed various youtube tutorials, and learned some stuff that way. But the problem with foss is there just isnāt much of that stuff (particularly in English) around.
Added to that is, as Mica aluded to, is the total screw up that is colour management. Some say itās neccesary, others not at all. There appears to be no-one standard here.
Another bug bear is not being able to get the same colours printed as is seen on screen. Iām not talking about brightness or gamma (as in the screens backlight), no, the actual colours - regardless of which profile the image is saved in. I am talking about commercial (shop) printers.
This is tip-of-the-iceberg stuff for me, and it all seems too daunting, but one place where it does fit very well isā¦ over thereā¦ In the ātoo hardā basket.
Iād be more confident if I lived in a major city somewhere, where the likelihood of meeting a FOSS/Linux/Photography nut would be much higher. But I donāt and that is where I come unstuck.
So, even though I havenāt fully made up my mind what to do with this dilemma, I think Iām edging toward putting it away for a while, take a few steps back, grab a breather and focus in on something else that might just be as rewarding as this could have been (or maybe still could be).
Cheers.
Just know that weāre here and weāre totally willing to help! If you have a question about something, open a thread. Part of what is awesome about Free Software is that weāre actively trying to make things better for the next person, so we can work through whatever issues you may have, and the next person that comes along (and there is always a next person) will reap the rewards; everyone leaves things a bit better than they were and suddenly we have something awesome.
Best of luck, weāll be here if/when youāre ready, and I hope you find peace.
My nonprofessional approach to this (please forgive me) was to buy a not too expensive EIZO with a dedicated sRGB mode that was tested favorably by several sites. Since then the prints I got from my professional print service match the colors I see on screen and everything is fine without much ado. Staying in sRGB might not be seen as professional, but itās definitely universal.
Keep on!
Flƶssie
+1. I understand that the advantages of AdobeRGB in very colour-rich photos are far outweighed by the time-consuming issues it often throws up for non-expert users, as well as the more general issues related to sharing non-sRGB images on the web. sRGB may not be the best in terms of absolute gamut, but it does allow one to get on with image-making and easily covers the needs of hobbyists such as myself.
I really think youād find things much, much easier if you make your whole workflow sRGB, and then ensure that your OS and monitor are set to use sRGB and adjust your monitor image controls so that things (websites, etc.) appear sane and balanced. That alone should get rid of issues such as the purple.
By all means, take a breather if you feel thatās the right thing. Donāt stop because of the colour issue alone, though. 