I went for a bit lighter rendition of the scene, thinking of how it would look as a print - where overly dark renditions tend to not work as well as on the monitor. I adjusted the gray point to move a bit away from the blue shade light in the foreground.(I\'m not certain yet whether this is better or not, or whether it also needs to be blended a bit with a mask.) The rest was done with many, many masked curves layers - which is generally my favorite way to control these things. I did do a bit of dodging/burning since that was a bit quicker for a few of the modifications I wanted to make.
One interesting and, I think, important point: I started with all three of your original images. When I looked at the brightest frame I found that it was really quite a decent exposure. The only part that was blown out was a very small bit of the bright sky right above the ridge at the left side, and this was easily fixed using the recovery slider in ACR. In the end, I started only used a tiny bit of the middle image in two places: I used a mask to bring in a bit of the very bright sky at the lower left from the darker image and I also brought a bit of it in to darken a few sections of the water. Frankly, I could have probably done this by modifying the single image, but since I had the darker middle version available I figured I\'d use it.
I also made a small CA correction and deleted one dust spot just below the grass covered peninsula extending from the right side.
Oh, and I cropped it to a 4:3 ratio. To my eye, there wasn\'t a lot at the right and left edges, and in fact by cropping I think I gave the bird and peak a bit more presence and accented the vertical dimension a bit.
Did I mention that I LEVELED the image? ;-)
Just for fun, I also did a quick BW rendition.
Finally to those who think that Photoshop work in post such as we see in this thread is not \"real photography,\" real photographers have been doing this sort of thing since the darkroom days. The only thing new here is the methods for doing post-processing - not the fact that it is done.
I went for a bit lighter rendition of the scene, thinking of how it would look as a print - where overly dark renditions tend to not work as well as on the monitor. I adjusted the gray point to move a bit away from the blue shade light in the foreground.(I\'m not certain yet whether this is better or not, or whether it also needs to be blended a bit with a mask.) The rest was done with many, many masked curves layers - which is generally my favorite way to control these things. I did do a bit of dodging/burning since that was a bit quicker for a few of the modifications I wanted to make.
One interesting and, I think, important point: I started with all three of your original images. When I looked at the brightest frame I found that it was really quite a decent exposure. The only part that was blown out was a very small bit of the bright sky right above the ridge at the left side, and this was easily fixed using the recovery slider in ACR. In the end, I started only used a tiny bit of the middle image in two places: I used a mask to bring in a bit of the very bright sky at the lower left from the darker image and I also brought a bit of it in to darken a few sections of the water. Frankly, I could have probably done this by modifying the single image, but since I had the darker middle version available I figured I\'d use it.
I also made a small CA correction and deleted one dust spot just below the grass covered peninsula extending from the right side.
Oh, and I cropped it to a 4:3 ratio. To my eye, there wasn\'t a lot at the right and left edges, and in fact by cropping I think I gave the bird and peak a bit more presence and accented the vertical dimension a bit.
Just for fun, I also did a quick BW rendition.
Finally to those who think that Photoshop work in post such as we see in this thread is not \"real photography,\" real photographers have been doing this sort of thing since the darkroom days. The only thing new here is the methods for doing post-processing - not the fact that it is done.
Dan
Mar 29, 2009 at 11:04 PM
Previous versions of danmitchell's message #6895354 « HDR vs NDGrad vs Manual Blend »
