First retouch - please critique

[yangez]

I decided to try a simple improvement of a pretty bad photo... I'm still very, very new to retouching so I'd appreciate detailed ways to improve. My untrained eye has seen a few things I would like to know in particular:

1. I'd like to get rid of the red-pinkish color on the upper left edges of the mountain. The entire image overall also looks kind of reddish still... is there any way to use the channels to solve this?

2. It would be nice to composite an image of a blue sky with clouds or something into the blank top-left corner. problem is, when I do this the colors never seem to match. How would I match the colors without switching the photo to b&w?

3. How was my noise reduction and sharpening?

Thanks so much for any help or any links to any help

Original: http://img91.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mccityogai0.jpg

Current: http://img168.imageshack.us/my.php?i...ccityrtir5.jpg

P.S. is imageshack any good or should I switch

[Swampy]

Yangez...

Two pretty easy fixes...

Select the mountain side. Do a hue Saturation on the REDS. Click the eyedropper in the pink area of one of the rocks, desaturate.

For the sky... see my "Blown Out Sky" tutorial. Link is in my signature. It will show you options for adding clouds or a gradient effect..

[philbach]

Yangez welcome to retouch pro. Using photoshop I used Image/Adjustments/Autocolor. I then used Swampy's technique of fixing the blown out sky too.

Image Shack is just fine and it was easy for me to download the image from that site.

The color of my retouch is far more green than Swampy's, and her retouch has more magenta in her photo than I do. You need to decide what the right color should be and go from there.

[yangez]

Awesome... thanks guys. I'm working on it now

[0lBaldy]

I think your noise reduction and sharpening look pretty good for this picture..

I selected the pinkest color I could find with the color picker then followed these instructions:
How to quickly remove a color cast
(without introducing a new one)

(Copied from http://www.johanfoto.com/Site/Pages/Colorcast.html )

A color cast caused by artificial light can be difficult to remove,
because simply using the gray eyedropper in 'Levels' or 'Curves' will
often create a new cast in places that were not lit by the artificial
light source. Scenes with mixed lighting, such as fluorescent and day
light, can also be tricky. The following alternative method often works
better than the gray eyedropper, and is just as easy.

Step 1:
Select the eyedropper tool and click on a place in the image that should
be neutral. This is to sample the color of the color cast.

Step 2:
Make a new layer and fill this layer with the color you've just sampled
(Edit - Fill - Foreground Color).
Then use 'Image - Adjustments - Invert' to invert this color.

Step 3:
Go to the Layers palette, and change the layer mode from 'Normal' to
'Color'. Next, change the opacity of this layer to anything that makes
the original photo come through without a color cast. Usually this will
be around 35%, but it can also be as low as 25% before you are satisfied
with the colors.

Then I did levels and curves
It seemed like an overcast day so I selected the two colors on the water and rendered clouds then blurred them and masked them into the corner

Didn't do any sharpening or noise reduction because yours looked pretty good

[chillin]

I’ve chosen one of the wild greenery in the mountain & plugged in the numbers from the hotel’s lawn, did some levels adjustments & high pass… it kind of came out like a post card.

[grannysdc]

Dang Chillin I think you nailed it! Looks good!

[chillin]

Thanks grannysdc I wish to know what city is this?
Looks kind of like Bergen.

[yangez]

Thanks guys, I've uploaded my new result, I think it looks a lot better but please critique if possible! TY for all the advice so far.

[yangez]

Oh, and sorry lol I don't exactly know what city this is. I got this stock a long time ago from a random source that I don't even remember, so can't help you there :/

[myfairies]

that's Montecarlo, Principality of Monaco

I live near it