Calving an Iceberg, Glacier Bay Alaska

[ArthurDent]

This is my second attempt at editing in Lightroom 6. Comments and criticisms are greatly appreciated.

[Jakov Minić]

It looks like it was cold
Was it really that blue?

[ArthurDent]

It looks like it was cold
Was it really that blue?

It was cold.  It was not that blue. The water was a kind of dirty gray and the ice picked up the color from the water. I like it better blue, although if I knew how to do it, I'd cut back on the blue tint of the ice, leaving all else as is.

[Akira]

Arthur, thanks for posting the image that eases the heat over here for a moment.

As for the processing, you may want to correct the hue to be true to what you saw.  But it looks cool (sorry, pun intended slightly) as it is: it well conveys the coldness you would have felt when you were there.

[MFloyd]

Hello Arthur. You asked for comments, so here we go: (1) I believe your image is underexposed, may be as the result of the dominant white in the image; (2) your picture is too blue; (3) lack of sharpness, at least in the image conveyed to this thread.

[Matthew Currie]

I was up there last year, and the blueness varies considerably both with the part of the glacier you're seeing, and with the weather.  It gets very blue in the evening.  Not too sure how this will show on all monitors, but this view looks pretty close on my uncalibrated laptop.  The face of the ice is bluer that the rest of the glacier, and varies depending on whether it has melted and refrozen.  Clear refrozen ice is very blue.*  The water is gray, and the glacier a kind of dirty white. And yes, it's not killer sharp,  place excuses here [..........].

*e.t.a. note on the lower right hand of the glacier just above the water there are bands of refrozen ice that are a deep blue.  It really is that blue.

[ArthurDent]

Hello Arthur. You asked for comments, so here we go: (1) I believe your image is underexposed, may be as the result of the dominant white in the image; (2) your picture is too blue; (3) lack of sharpness, at least in the image conveyed to this thread.

Thank you MFloyd for your criticism. The NEF appears to be sharp to my eye. The image was shot using my D500 with 28-105mm f/3.5- 4.5 lens at 28mm. Exposure was 1/800 sec @f/14 and ISO was 100.  Bjorn says the lens should be good up to f/16, but perhaps that data applies more to earlier cameras? In any event, in Lightroom I set sharpening to 72 and noise reduction to 40. I did not adjust the radius at all. I would appreciate any guidance which you, or any of the others on the forum, might offer as to how to go about adjusting for maximum sharpness. It has been a common criticism of my images posted on the forum that they are "not sharp," so obviously I am missing something. Any guidance , suggestions or tips as to how to adjust for maximum sharpness would be appreciated.
Another thought, since I have been using Lightroom, I have been posting at 72 ppi based on a suggestion I saw on YouTube. Should I be using a higher resolution?

[ArthurDent]

In the export panel, there is a setting for sharpening. This is the same image with high sharpening applied. I did not use this setting in my initial post. Does this address your sharpness concerns? Still at 72 ppi.

To my eye, this image appears to be slightly over-sharpened.

[ArthurDent]

This is with standard sharpening applied to the exported image. Still at 72 ppi.

[ArthurDent]

This is at 300 pixels/inch, otherwise same settings as previous post. To me it looks slightly less sharp. Look at the reflections in the water at the left side and compare with the previous image.

[ArthurDent]

Perhaps noise reduction is not required for an image taken at ISO 100? Any thoughts? Same image as previous, but no noise reduction.

[ArthurDent]

Same image as previous, no noise reduction, 72 ppi.
This appears to be the best sharpness thus far.

[pluton]

IMO posting these images at 1028 pixels across does not do justice to the detail contained in them.  Accounting for that, the one with the 'standard sharpening' seems best on my large monitor.  I'm not seeing the effect of the noise reduction settings, and the PPI setting used in the creation of the JPEG is...as far as I know...irrelevant for this purpose.  Maybe repost at 2000 pixel across for nicer detail?  A slightly larger file size, but still well under 2 MB, might be called for as well.
I like the color rendition.

[ArthurDent]

Thank you, Keith. I'll re-post a larger file later this evening.

[Matthew Currie]

A quick and dirty bit of color correction reducing the blue and a tiny bit of the green and restoring a little bit of highlight looks, on my monitor at least, a bit closer to what I remember.  It is hard, though, to get the colors right here, because as I'm sure you noticed, the light changes dramatically and constantly, and with it the color of just about everything.

This was a quick bit of correcting in Faststone Image Viewer using channel levels, not bothering with curves.