I forgot to mention, posting rewords are very welcomed. I failed to mention that this was an exposure blend between two shots. Thanks for your feedback, Ben.
I think I can see the slight effects of the blend in the trees and might try to refine that a little, that is a tough one to blend. Other than that, I quite like it. The scattered weed/flowers in the field play towards the abandoned nature of the barn. Very vibrant too.
@Travis, yeah I can see it too. The light through those trees were killing me on the blend. There may have been a little wind too which might have complicated the blend even more between the two shots I used. This was my second attempt at exposure blending photo shoots. I'll keep practicing. I'd like to get to a point where I can actually sell landscape shots professionally.
I have found on my more difficult blends, that I have spent hours working the tree line. While it is time consuming, I find it more difficult to hide the effects of a GND filter. One way to do that would be to artificially darken the trees a bit, since that is where it shows up the most. Since they would have been more backlit than they are presented here, you could get away with it I think. Maybe you could post up the two shots you worked from.
I see, this is a scene where I would be tempted to use 3 exposures. One for that awesome sky, one for the tree line to blend it to the sky, and one for the field. Your difference in your two exposures is so far apart, too far IMO. I do like your re-work, it is looking more plausible to my eye. I still think that the field and barn might be a touch too bright, given the scene, but it is getting better.
Good pointers. Maybe I can find time this evening. I took about 5 different exposures so I should be able to find something in the middle. Thanks so much for your help!!!
Todd; I can see you have an eye for detail... This is a very nice image with some minor problems... Since you ask for suggestions, and indicated rework was ok, I give you a three blend HDR... I used your blended image for the neutral exposure and set the others at + - 1EV... This is the default image from Nik HDR Efex 2...
If you have a middle image, try this 3 image blend linked below. If you only have 2 images, make one a middle image in ACR with exposure during raw conversion.
Here is a quick try. Hard to do with jpgs but I took your dark image and made a mid version with +1 exposure. I then used the 3 image blend with gaussian blur method. I also applied a gradient mask on the bright one after I had it in the stack. I blended it sharply at the tree line.
Edit, that version was a straight blend job. I knew more could be had so I did shadow highlight and Topaz Photo Pop for the second version.
Well, I started from scratch and tried blending 3 photos. I'm not sure if I'm totally satisfied with the exposure of the tree line, but I'm sick of working on it now! Time for me to move on.
I like your latest version. A few tweaks to consider:
- select the barn and apply Image>Adjust>Shadows/Highlights to mine more from the shadows
- reduce the vibrance and saturation a little
- dodge the shadows of the tree-line and the large tree on the right
- darken the foreground
- slightly dodge the highlights of the clouds
I like Karen's rendition, might also work on the halos around the two big trees that canopy out into the sky.
I think that sometimes to get a great image that you can't actually shoot in one frame, you will find that the time spent in front of a computer screen looking at it will be longer than usual. Don't get tired of it, see it as a means to an end, if you can end up selling an image often enough, it will be worth the effort.
