River Rock Pools

Your picture is posted in the right forum . The purple/red refection in the water that you referred to is from a magenta cast to the image. I also noticed that in this image as well as the last one your histogram in both cases is just a flat line with no peaks. While there's a small bit of barrel distortion, there's more noticeably a tilt to the right on the horizon. If you look at your foliage, and use your eyedropper you'll find that that whole area is almost pure black. Now not meaning any disrespect, it's easy to know all about PS on an intellectual level and not on a practical, hands on level. It has taken me several years of trial and error and experimentation to acquire whatever skills (or lack of thereof) I have with image editing software.

I redid your image and did the following:corrected the white balance, straightened the tilt, adjusted the levels, highlighted the trees and created a new sky I can throw in a few clouds if you want ).

I hope my short treatise is not discouraging but encouraging. The most important thing I did in the beginning (and still do) was and is to look at as many good images as possible and try to assimilate whatever I could.

Harvey Edelman wrote: I redid your image and did the following:corrected the white balance, straightened the tilt, adjusted the levels, highlighted the trees and created a new sky I can throw in a few clouds if you want ).

I had my white balance set on Flash because it's pretty close to Sunny in my eyes. I'd also heard that a lot of professional slide films were set for flash also. I set it back to sunny today.

Also, the rotating I did was true to life. The trees are straight (the bottom line), the rock beach is supposed to be off-axis because that's the way it is in real life. But since it does come off as looking off-axis, thanks for noticing, because I never would've noticed it at first.

Your process is nice, but a bit bright for the time of day. It's been a bummer lately though, we haven't got any interesting sunsets lately. Occasionally we'd get some nice ones that are glowing orange, but lately it's been yellow, ugh.

Here's a suggestion Steve. Why don't you just shoot in AWB and shoot in RAW. This way you can convert the Kelvin temperature with software without damaging the original. If flash WB setting looks good in the converted image then you can go with that. If you can afford it, I'd look into buying and downloading Breeze Browser, a conversion program specifically for Canon cameras. It's very easy to use. If you can't afford it at this time then the conversion software that came with the camera will do. If you don't like the color of the sky...then change it. The photo is your interpretation of what you saw. In addition, the camera has a far more limited chroma range than the human eye does. And our brain fills in the blanks.

Yeah, I've decided I'm going to shoot my landscapes in RAW now. I originally shot RAW with this camera doing all my post processing in BreezeBrowser, but I eventually got tired of converting all of my photos and just shot JPG/Fine instead, metering my own white balance. But I got into some problems with that (using a white card) because I screwed up two shots and am still puzzled as to why. After this outing I'll definitely be shooting RAW when I only need 30 or so photos (all my 128mb card stores).

Thanks for the tips.