Colorado and Utah Trip - Rocky Mountain National Park (Lots of Pics)

Awais Yaqub

I am out of words...
Will come back when i find words to praise these pictures

dlplumer

jamesl wrote:

"Elk at Sunset" - Canon 30D w/ Canon 28mm lens + Polarizer. 1 shot bracketted -1/0/+1 (in ACR). 3 resulting images tone mapped in Photomatix and finalized in CS3.

James, how did you avoid Elk movement on your HDR shot?

schmoo

dlplumer wrote:

James, how did you avoid Elk movement on your HDR shot?

Maybe it's all one elk

BTW, I edited your post to remove the 10 full-sized images in the quote

jamesl

dlplumer wrote:

James, how did you avoid Elk movement on your HDR shot?

Lol Schmoo. My editting skills are no where near that good.

For some of my HDRs, I actually work with a single RAW file. In Adobe Camera Raw, I extract a -1/0/+1 exposure from the image. The resulting three images can be combined in Photomatix to create a "Poor Man's HDR", as I've heard it called. IMO, the results can be pretty good, and can really increase the shadow and highlight details.

James

jamesl

JohnC wrote:

Amazing work!

Thanks John!

jamesl

Awais Yaqub wrote:

I am out of words...
Will come back when i find words to praise these pictures

I appreciate the compliments man! Thanks.

James

anwmn1

Superb work of creating fantastic images. All of these are fantastic!!

dlplumer

jamesl wrote:

Lol Schmoo. My editting skills are no where near that good.

For some of my HDRs, I actually work with a single RAW file. In Adobe Camera Raw, I extract a -1/0/+1 exposure from the image. The resulting three images can be combined in Photomatix to create a "Poor Man's HDR", as I've heard it called. IMO, the results can be pretty good, and can really increase the shadow and highlight details.

James

Understood. I've done that myself with Aperture and Photomatix, but yours look much better than mine.

jamesl

dlplumer wrote:

Understood. I've done that myself with Aperture and Photomatix, but yours look much better than mine.

Here's what my settings for Photomatix generally are (from a recent private message reply):

Thanks! It can be tough to get good results in Photomatix. It really depends upon the scene (do you have strong contrasts in light and dark), and the settings in the program you use.

Here's a general idea of the settings I use:

Exposure bracketted at -1/0/+1 (can be from a single RAW image)
Strength 35 to 40
Saturation 55%
Luminosity -2
Light smoothing 1 (second from the far right)
Microcontrast 2 (all the way to the right)
Microsmoothing 0 to 5
White Point .25%
Black Point 0
Gamma 1.20

Also, working with 16 bit TIFF files generated from RAW really helps, IMO.

James

dlplumer

jamesl wrote:

Here's what my settings for Photomatix generally are (from a recent private message reply):

Thanks! It can be tough to get good results in Photomatix. It really depends upon the scene (do you have strong contrasts in light and dark), and the settings in the program you use.

Here's a general idea of the settings I use:

Exposure bracketted at -1/0/+1 (can be from a single RAW image)
Strength 35 to 40
Saturation 55%
Luminosity -2
Light smoothing 1 (second from the far right)
Microcontrast 2 (all the way to the right)
Microsmoothing 0 to 5
White Point .25%
Black Point 0
Gamma 1.20

Also, working with 16 bit TIFF files generated from RAW really helps, IMO.

James

Thanks James. I appreciate your generosity

jamesl

anwmn1 wrote:

Superb work of creating fantastic images. All of these are fantastic!!

Thanks Aaron! I also really appreciated your shots from the trip. Great stuff!

James

jamesl

dlplumer wrote:

Thanks James. I appreciate your generosity

Sure thing. Hope it helps you.

I'm actually planning on putting together a Finishing School thread on my workflow using Photomatix, so stay tuned for that.

James

schmoo

jamesl wrote:

Sure thing. Hope it helps you.

I'm actually planning on putting together a Finishing School thread on my workflow using Photomatix, so stay tuned for that.

James

Oooo, awesome!