Storm Over Lake McDonald - Glacier National Park

Love the composition it is very strong. Would have been nice more detail in the trees to the right?

I like what you did with the clouds but not sure that it matches the bottom part of the image. Not sure if I am explaining myself well. I am getting two texture feelings one rough and one smooth.

Keep bring them out .... sure is a pleasure to look at

I can probably do what you suggest, Alfred, but it will have to wait until I can rescan this slide. I've lost the original scan and only had this rework of it in wallpaper size. My scanning process has been halted because I had to return the scanner after it developed a fault.

So, once I can rescan I'll need to develop more details in the trees to right and see if I can't balance the effect in the FG + MG against what I did in the BG. Thanks!

The effect is lovely. I might even try and desaturate is some. Only minor bother is the hotspot and it's reflection.

Grain does add to the ominous look. The image is not to my taste, tho.

Paul, I'm curious, is it the composition you don't like, or my treatment of the image? Should I have just left it alone, in your opinion? Just wondering for when I next work on this image...

I should have explained more. The composition is terrific. The reflection with the parallel shapes on either side with contrasting shade and light and the use of the tree on the right are great! I should've said that. Three things I don't care for. The grain most of all. While I agree that it adds to the ominous feel, to me it mainly looks dirty, muddy. Second, I don't care for what the effect does with the blue haze in the mountains on the left side. Those two, of course, are simply my reaction to it, while others may really like those effects. Third, is the hotspot that Ken noted, which especially draws my attention in the reflection.

Ok, I can buy all of that, Paul. Obviously, everyone will get different things from an image, some of which some like and others don't. No problem. I agree I overdid the contrast/grain thing and I can work on the hotspot area too. When I can get this slide rescanned I'll do a different treatment of it and post the reworked image. Then, let's see how the new image works for you.

Thanks for your input - I really appreciate it!

I look forward to the new image. Also, some effects and detail just don't transfer well to the small posting restrictions for a web image. Seems to be compounded here, too, when you were working from an image saved as wallpaper. BTW, other than having to return the scanner because of some problem, how do you like it?

Paul, in the past I've owned a Minolta Scan Elite II and a Minolta 5400, both of which I returned for reasons having to do with quality and problems (the Elite II's quality wasn't what I wanted and the 5400 had problems with thin green horizontal lines in the dense areas of scans).

The Coolscan V was perfect from my perspective. It gave me enough resolution at 4000 dpi and the speed of scanning that I did not get from the Minolta 5400. Scans of my 35mm slides on the Coolscan were about a minute or two while on the 5400 dense slides could take an hour or more! My comparison of scans from the two scanners on the same slides indicated that the 5400 had a slight edge in detail because of its 5400 dpi versus the 4000 dpi of the Coolscan, but everything else in the scanned image seemed the same. With the Coolscan I would never use the GEM, ROC, and DEE portions of their ICE4 system as I wasn't under total control of the processing of the pixels and didn't like the scanned results in many cases. Instead, I would only use ICE for scratch removal (not if Kodachrome - it doesn't work well on that) and the gain control to ensure that the histogram was well placed. Too bad that after 4 days of heavy use it developed a sensor problem that caused a very apparent light band across the scan. I'm going overseas for two weeks but after I return I'll work on getting the replacement. So... yes, I like the Coolscan V.