Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Don't Laugh

Today is very gloomy, lots of clouds, and rain threatening but never quite reaching the ground. The view out the window changes every few minutes, and when I saw some big, puffy clouds, I grabbed my camera and took several bracketed shots. I started at -2EV and ended with +3EV. This was going to be my first try at composing an HDR photograph.

Here is the "normal" auto-exposed photo, which I tweaked in Photoshop using curves and levels. Nothing special.


When I merged six images into the HDR program, and then tweaked them using Topaz, I came up with this:


Yikes! Not what I was expecting, not at all realistic, but it is very dramatic and "artsy," which I do like. The clouds ended up with some pink highlights - I have no idea how that happened. Later, however, when I looked out the window again, I did notice some pink in the clouds and the sky. It was just a lot more real looking than the HDR photo, which seemed to harden that pink color.

I can tell I will be having a lot of fun learning how to do this properly!

2 comments:

  1. I actually like it! It's very artsy. If I could suggest one thing, it would be to crop out the edge of the building on the right and give it a bit more of a vignette. It's a good first try, for sure!

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  2. Thanks, Lori! I appreciate your comments!

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