Wednesday, May 13, 2009

The Beauty of Digital Photography

After processing this photo in Lightroom and Photoshop, I was amazed at the difference of what I started with (bottom photo) and what I ended up with below. Just goes to show what your digital camera actually captures, but you don't always see. The details are all there, you just have to bring them out in Photoshop. You can barely see the highlights of the clouds in the bottom photo, and the greens are all washed out....

So, this is what I did...

Since my original photo was RAW (I always shoot in RAW), I created three photos from the original at different exposures in Lightroom. The only thing I changed was the exposure values. I created one at +1, one at the original setting, and one at -1. The -1 exposure captured the details in the clouds, and the +1 caputured lost details in the shadow areas. I then blended the three photos into and HDR using Photomatix, and tone mapped. After Photomatix, it looked pretty good, but I then reopened the photo in Photoshop, and did a curve adjustment and color balance adjustment to get the greens correct....then sharpened...


10 comments:

kRiZcPEc said...

Nice tutorial, gave a star!

Sharon said...

Incredible!!

Eve said...

Wow! Thanks for sharing the instructions. I've been playing with HDR a little bit, but so far haven't had much success... I'm going to go find a photo and try this out using your method!

Anonymous said...

WoW! I am amazed at the difference & I'm so glad you filled us in on how you got that beautiful bright photo - I have Photomatix, but I have to get a better digital camera to shoot the different exposures - the one I have now has some settings, but not exp settings - it's just a point & click camera.
I also was wondering the proper order making adjustments, like when to sharpen. Thanks so much!!!

Anonymous said...

I also wanted to ask you something about the HDR - I read somewhere that HDR photos have to have the sky in them because of the contrast between the ground & sky (light & dark) go against each other. Is that correct?

Anonymous said...

Thank you so very much - I sincerely appreciate your help. I'm going to work on all that this weekend & see what I can come up with!

Thanks again - You're a huge help!

Arlene said...

Hi Scotty, thanks for sharing this info about photo editing. I only used photoshop but i don't come up with all that wonderful work you have here.

Really this is an impressive work!

katarashop said...

are you living at Indonesia/Jakarta??
Jakarta is very hot ... ^_^'

where you get this picture??, it's beautiful ..

Scotty Graham said...

Yes, I live in Jakarta, and this photo was taken in Sukabumi...

Cheers,

Scotty

J.C. said...

Awesome, this is like a magic wand. I have many shots like the one below. Time to PS-ed them to make them stand out! Thanks for sharing your tips!