I feel your pain and admire your making the best of it. Hopefully the computer woes will resolve soon. I think this image is wonderful. It reminds me of a coral reef and I love the textures and composition in general. The only thing I have to suggest would be to remove some of the leaves that are sticking in from the edges. Particularly on the right side. Nice work!   Posted: 02/09/2021 16:01:37

I like your persistence in the face of annoying computer problems. I like the black and white conversion as it enhances the details in the foliage and mushroom. I did a little tighter crop, pretty much square. I think you did a wonderful job removing what looks to be a long dead leaf on the left of the mushroom.   Posted: 02/10/2021 18:25:05

For me, the multiple textures in this image are a WOW factor. It all looks sharp and I think it has good tonal range. I feel that monochrome was an excellent choice. I also like the crop that Pam suggested. I am so glad you decided not to skip round and instead presented this lovely image.   Posted: 02/13/2021 10:58:42

There is a great deal of interesting texture in the leaves as well as the mushroom. The image is sharp. I think it is bit bright and would add a levels curve to take the brightness down a bit. I like Pamela's crop. I hope you soon find your images.

If you converted to black and white in frustration, I do want to tell you I like the color version as well.   Posted: 02/13/2021 11:51:27

An interesting photo with many different textures to look at and converting to black & white is perfect to show these off. To me it is a tad bright so would adjust perhaps the contrast slider. I like where you have positioned the mushroom within the frame. Nicely done.   Posted: 02/15/2021 17:11:33

Image first: DAM stuff after
I think this is an interesting image and the fine details are well focussed. You might want to play even further and darken some leaves/areas down and see how that affects the composition. I popped it into my tools and messed around with a few sloppy/quick masks just to help illustrate. Focussing on different subjects can really add to the composition and pull the eye across an image.

As for DAM stuff: as someone with close to 13000 images/videos in Photos (I use my iPhone for ranch documentation work and prune monthly) I cannot stress enough how great that app can be with regular care and feeding. Just like the big management packages you can organize images in countless ways: keywords, faces, geolocation, date, smart subject, etc. I used to be a heavy Aperture user and only jumped to CaptureOne two years after Apple EoL'd it (when it I upgraded my DSLR Aperture didn't support my new RAWs,) but a ton of the old Aperture features, including native non-destructive editing, are now built in to Photos.



As for the dying hard drive, you might want to upgrade your DAM setup. Consider an off-site solution like Backblaze or, if you have a .Mac/iCloud account, use that. I too use an external drive for my photo libraries (anything not shot with my iPhone) which I then have sync regularly to a file server that sits in another building here at the ranch. Then that machine (which houses a lot of other stuff) syncs to a server off-site. Feel free to hit me up if you have questions about this kind of thing.   Posted: 02/19/2021 22:41:14