Is this Believable????

Hi hmca,


Very nice and more dramatic scene in your composite........however, a small section looks a little odd to me.

The fence (circled in red) just doesn't quite look totally realistic to me. 

To me it looks very much like you have cloned the 2 sections of the fence.

I suspect the source of the clone is the very similar section of the fence to the right of the orange post in the starter image.

So there are 3 sections of the fence that look too similar to be realistic - at least to my eyes and brain.

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The apparent cloning of the 2 fence sections is more obvious in this image with a full tonal range.

The dark diagonal line in the sand in the 3 green circled areas is a tell-tale that the sand has been cloned which takes away some realism in the image.

I also see that the 3 black and white posts infront of the 3 cloned fence sections are all at the same angle. That's another tell-tale that the scene has been edited and takes away some realism.

Also, I am not sure why you have taken out a lot of the contrast that's present in the original image.  Is it for some kind of effect - mist or fog perhaps?

The original image with a full tonal range looks much better imo and so the composite with a full tonal range would also look better imho.

Something like this perhaps? (I did a rough Levels adjustment) but the 3 similar sections of the fence and sand need to be differentiated by touching up.

The fence and sand cloning and the 3 posts at the same angle are the things that jump out at me.

Just my 2c worth 

I wouldn't right off this image yet because you think it doesn't work if you really like the composite scene.

Many times when you edit a scene by changing or cloning elements you need to spend a bit of time to eliminate tell-tale repeating elements.  Usually this is not too difficult, but could be tedious depending on what you are editing.

But to make editing a little easier, and I don't know if this is what you did, I always clone onto a new layer.  In case you are not aware how to do this -

1.  Create a new blank layer above the layer you want to clone something.

2.  Click the lower layer to make it active.

3.  Select the Clone Tool, then Alt and left-click  the starting point for the cloning.

4.  Now click the new blank layer above to make it active

5.  Start painting by left clicking and holding on the new blank layer from where you want the cloning to start.

The output of the cloning is now on a separate layer on which you can use the healing brushes, eraser tool, rotate/transform the new layer and any other appropriate tools and/or adjustment layers to edit the cloned element to make it look different from the source of the clone but still realistic.

Hope this helps