The Skillion, another natural exposure blend

Nothing special but still a nice shot with interesting water movement. Multiple exposure blend. Hopefully by next week I will have the Canon 16-35mm f2.8 and I can off load the 17-40mm f4 which this one was shot on.

Click the image to see the larger view.

North Avoca Beach Sunrise – Natural HDR

Ok finally got a set of shots with some dramatic light to test out the natural HDR blending look that I have been playing with and refining and this is the result. I have included below the shot that makes the over exposed just so you can see the massive difference between the exposures on the headland and sky and the blending needed for the under exposed shots.

Without going into too much detail this technique obviously is about complex Photoshop masking but the work and look in Photoshop is greatly helped if you capture your bracked shots thinking ahead of how it is all going to come together later and areas that might be challenging. I like how it is a combination of both. Good capture and good editing… I hate when it is all about your Photoshop skills.

With processing this shot one of the main things I learnt is not to get too greedy with highlight detail and shadow detail. As pushing it too far it looks to unnatural even though the detail is impressive.

Click any of the images for a larger view.

Developing the Manual HDR workflow – making progress

Ok… further playing and refinement is going well. Sure this image isnt much to look at and is missing quite a lot of nice features especially in the water but have a look at the original files below and this is the result from the workflow I am playing with. All done manually in photoshop with masks and understanding the positives and negatives in each images luminosity.

For me the technique is useless if you can’t print high quality large images from the final completed image. So the masking and blending has to be good. Looking good online means nothing to me. I’m glad to say the blending of highlight to shadow in this is pretty darn good. Click on the main image and have a look at it large, notice how there are no halo’s.

Now all I need is a better scene and challenging light to see how I go with putting it together.