Help getting a picture to it's full potential

[Neroon]

In 2010 I had been using a cheap superzoom camera, when I went to Scotland for a work placement/internship, the urge to get a 'proper' camera became to strong, and I bought my first DSLR, a Nikon D3000. It was a massive step up and I never regretted getting it.

 

1 of the things I did there, was take pictures from Edinburgh castle, to make a panorama. I had no clue how it would turn out, I knew the software existed, but my cheap laptop couldn't handle that. Because of that I never really put the time into really looking at the photo's until I got home. What makes things all that much worse, was that I was stupid enough to shoot in jpeg only (after those first few months, I've always shot jpeg+raw).

 

The pictures in general turned out quite good. Would I shoot better pictures now? Absolutely, but the quality in general is more than good enough, and I tried the demo of Topaz and that seems to clean up some blurry stuff like trees and all that, so that's something I want to do, but what I mainly want is to deal with the sky. The sky looked really quite good imo that day, but parts got blown out, I tried getting some detail and general contrast back, but it didn't have the effect I wanted.

 

I could see to replace the sky, but I don't want that, this picture has sentimental value, and I rather keep it blown out, then to replace it with a different sky. Instead I rather get a little detail in those spots, but I don't know where to begin.

 

So can anyone help me so I can get this picture as best as it can. I want to get it printed on aluminium.

 

The picture added is the one I edited over 10 years ago, before I start modifying it, I will make a fresh panorama of the original jpegs.

[Rex Hite]

There's a lot of cyan and blue colour noise in the sky. Before printing I would select the sky and apply some selective de-noise filtration. You could also go a bit further and reduce the saturation the clouds. A bit of filling-in with some cloning or selective replacement could be done as well but I like that there is brighter sky at each end so I'd leave that.

 

I did a quick mock-up of some ideas of how I might prepare the image for printing.

The first edit just treats the sky, and the second edit removes the asymmetry of the high roof on the far left while making the sky less prominent. But I like clouds so maybe keeping the picture as half land, half sky is preferable. The third edit just selectively alters the shadows because some printing techniques and processes tend to darken shadows so this compensates for that. But the specifics of the printer should determine how much of this should be done.

 

 

Bear in mind monitors present colours and contrast differently.

 

 

[Neroon]

1 hour ago, Rex Hite said:

There's a lot of cyan and blue colour noise in the sky. Before printing I would select the sky and apply some selective de-noise filtration. You could also go a bit further and reduce the saturation the clouds. A bit of filling-in with some cloning or selective replacement could be done as well but I like that there is brighter sky at each end so I'd leave that.

 

I did a quick mock-up of some ideas of how I might prepare the image for printing.

The first edit just treats the sky, and the second edit removes the asymmetry of the high roof on the far left while making the sky less prominent. But I like clouds so maybe keeping the picture as half land, half sky is preferable. The third edit just selectively alters the shadows because some printing techniques and processes tend to darken shadows so this compensates for that. But the specifics of the printer should determine how much of this should be done.

 

 

Bear in mind monitors present colours and contrast differently.

 

 

That sky looks so much better, that's really good!
Yeah the cyan is my mistake. Amateur me tried to get that sky back to life and also bring some colour in.
I'm trying to make a new stitch, but sadly the free stitching programs I've tried using, do a decent job overal, but they still leave some noticeable ghosting where people moved etc, whereas I don't detect that with my old one, which was done with autopano. I sadly do not have the original stitch.
Gonna have to spend a little more time trying to get the right stitching program, or possibly I will just modify the pictures by hand, by cutting out parts that are problematic, and see if those programs can just ignore those parts, it's really only 4 points that I noticed, which are because of people moving closest to the camera. Didn't see any noticeable issues with the traffic down the road.

If you could do your magic with the sky after I got a proper pano, that would be amazing.

As for cropping, I'm a bit mixed on that, I got a few ways that I can crop the image, there will always be a lot of sky available, as it's mostly the bottom vs the sides as to how much I need to cut. I know about the rule of thirds, but I like how much sky there is.

Colour wise I need to see where I end up on. If I had shot this today, I would have shot HDR and make it pop a little, but I obviously didn't, so it is what it is. But I can just test some stuff and see what's pleasing.

I will contact the site to see what generally happens to images, but I remember that aluminium prints are really good colour accuracy wise.

[Rex Hite]

I like the browns and burnt reds but if it were me I would remove the two people wearing bright red in the near foreground left. Especially if you plan on increasing saturation.

 

[Roswell]

Unfortunate that the clouds are so heavy, otherwise you'd have a lot more room to play around and keep it within the realm of reality. This is probably pushing it... Regardless, you have plenty of range to play around with if you choose to do so.