It’s interesting how different the waves and the sky behave when editing. There’s a balance to be struck between their brightnesses, and their internal contrasts.
Also note how the left side gets a tad darker, especially in the sky. And how the water loses a bit specularity towards the right edge.
I think it actually turned out really well. It catches the eye, without being distracting. The water looks satisfyingly wet, for lack of a better word, and the sky draws you in, but doesn’t overwhelm.
I had it printed with Whitewall in Germany. They were not the fastest, compared to other labs. I had beforehand ordered a sampler set of the various materials they have on offer, and a small test print to check the color reproduction. This was extremely useful, as the test print was not at all satisfactory; the difference between a screen rendition and the print were too great to anticipate. But with appropriate adjustments, the final print looks very good!
Quality is only OK. This was somewhat anticipated, and specifically the reason for choosing canvas over less forgiving materials. But the original image wasn’t perfectly sharp to begin with, and noticeably soft on the right edge in particular. Lightroom’s AI upscaling helped some, as did judicious sharpening in darktable. But if you look closely, you can tell. (But you don’t notice that at normal viewing distances).
Lovely photo. My play in GIMP.
I felt that the second yacht on the right created two centres of the picture, so I cropped it out and also made it a slightly more panoramic aspect. Other than that just small local adjustments to contrast and saturation.
