By I’ve taken photos for years and use different software to enhance the final results to express what I want. With this painting, I was not quite sure about the distant cliffs and the depth of color in the ocean. Too light? Darken? My instinct was that darkening both would make a better painting in the sense of contrast.
Overall, I like the above painting – it looks pretty good. In the one below, I used a brush in Lightroom to darken the cliffs and the sea.
I like the second choice better. I haven’t painted over the cliffs or ocean to make them darker, but if I were to publish things, I could do some “post” in a digital format. If you look at the frame of the above image, you will see parts of it are darker, the result of using the LR brush.
I wonder how many other artists do post-processing of their paintings. I have taken scans and turned them into black and white images to check contrast and value – so why not for making painting decisions as well? It’s all a learning process.
Journey by Paper 