rdonson
Premium Pilot
Thank you Eagle's Eye Video (A) and rdonson (B) for two impressive, and different, renditions of Graham's image. It would be fascinating to read both your step-by-steps. FWIW (not much - my eyes are subjective and I haven't used any tools to analyse), here's what I get from them:
A. Less brightness, less contrast, more detail - especially in shadows, warm palette, bright blue sky
B. Impressive sharpness, more brightness, more contrast, less detail, cool palette, gray overcast sky
As a work of art, I prefer A. As an arresting advertising image, I prefer B. And you both did a great job in smoothing out Graham's canvas texture.
Incidentally, it wasn't until I opened A and B that I realised that the miniature Chinese lanterns on the beach were actually birds!
YuKay, a couple of thoughts.
To judge color you need a calibrated monitor. Without calibration you have no reference point.
Most RAW (including DNG) photos are taken with 12-14 bits of color information. Good editing software will enable you to work in a 16 bit wide gamut color space such as ProPhotoRGB. There are a lot of good reasons to use the big color spaces including fine art printing.
JPEGs contain 8 bits of color data so you may be throwing away a lot of color data when exporting from your photo editing software. Yes, most of the Internet denizens only know about and deal with JPEGs. If you’re serious about the photograph you likely save your editing as a TIFF with maximum color data. Then you can export to JPEG for sharing on the internet and have the TIFF saved if you want to do more with the image.
Hope this helps,
Ron