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.
hmm looks pretty good… but for me is laking some contrast, i looks a bit washed out for me
cheers
Quite possibly Mitch… looking at this again there is quite a few other things I could throw at it, but it was done just for the blending and the colour I didn’t really explore deeper colour editing other than with masks or even dodge and burning, etc… I’ll save all that for a better overall image with more substance.
Very interested to see how this develops (no pun intended) … some great potential here in creating an image rather than just hoping for the best with HDR
Yea HDR with programs like Photomatix really is hit and miss… more miss than anything from my limited experience. This image didnt really take that long to do and put together. Probably about 15 minutes with a bit of back tracking to refine a few things.
Been playing around a bit with LR/Enfuse and I’m really pleased with the way it produces a way more ‘realistic’ image
It is so original,so nature ,and so beautiful,even I can see the original colors of those stones. I feel I want to take off my shoes and have a little walk on these stones badly..This image is “alive” for me.Now it has its own life and power.Congratulations.Matt,you make it,keep going.
Looks great and natural! It doesn’t look PS’d at all. 15 minutes well spent!
Much better job than Photo Matrix could achieve. Looks real