Enhancing your landscapes - Rivers

[leighdiprose]

What gets me outdoors taking photos? Grey skies and rain – lots of rain! When I had some spare time after a meeting today I navigated my way down to the river in between showers to take this photo for you all.

The final image can be found at http://www.leighdiprosephotography.wordpress.com

Feel free to share the link to anyone else that my benefit from this free tutorial.

[Xenedis]

I had a look at your tutorial, and I see that you use non-destructive editing techniques such as layers, masks and blend modes.

What greatly perplexes me is why you're flattening your layers after each processing stage.

Flattening the layers removes your ability to view, change or disable your individual changes, and in your case, you're left with the original exposure, plus one layer containing the result of all of the changes you've made.

This essentially negates the benefits provided by non-destructive editing.

I've seen other people do this in post-processing tutorials, but I'm afraid I do not understand why.

I preserve all of my layers so that I can individually make enhancements to specific types of adjustments, and also so that I can see in the future what types of changes I made to a particular image or series of images.

[milesy]

I had a look at your tutorial, and I see that you use non-destructive editing techniques such as layers, masks and blend modes.

What greatly perplexes me is why you're flattening your layers after each processing stage.

Flattening the layers removes your ability to view, change or disable your individual changes, and in your case, you're left with the original exposure, plus one layer containing the result of all of the changes you've made.

This essentially negates the benefits provided by non-destructive editing.

I've seen other people do this in post-processing tutorials, but I'm afraid I do not understand why.

I preserve all of my layers so that I can individually make enhancements to specific types of adjustments, and also so that I can see in the future what types of changes I made to a particular image or series of images.

i wondered this myself ?

[RubyKatz]

Amazing how a photo editing software can completely change the look of a photo. Maybe this is why the untrained eye cannot tell the difference in many cases?
I love all the different techniques that people have shown me along the way in my journey of discovery!