Shot just before the downpour

ZBlack

Taken a few days ago in Seal Rock, OR. Just from a turnout along side the highway. Was prepping for the sunsetting, but the clouds rolled in faster than I anticipated and started to pour as I was packing up. Still like this shot though! This is a 3 bracket exposure, with a little tone mapping, so I guess it'd be considered HDR? C&C always welcome.

Crewd

Gawgeous!

-Patrick

KevXman

Nice! The clouds are stunning. No real crits on my part other than the bright spot top center that keeps drawing my eye to it, but not sure what you can do about it. Maybe try carefully cloning in some clouds to cover it? Great processing without being overdone. thumb

— Kevin

Bryans12v

I think its a little overboard HDR wise unless thats the look you were going for. Just seems too unreal. Otherwise, great shot and kudos for cathcing it before you got soaked!

ZBlack

I wanted to bring out more of the texture and tone in the clouds and sand primarily. But I did want it to look very real still, but not like a snapshot style photo. I'm not very good with layers, masks and stuff like that, but still learning the more I try for selective edits and such. Perhaps I'll rework it some and see what I can do.

Thanks for the comments this far!

JC

ZBlack wrote: »

I wanted to bring out more of the texture and tone in the clouds and sand primarily. But I did want it to look very real still, but not like a snapshot style photo. I'm not very good with layers, masks and stuff like that, but still learning the more I try for selective edits and such. Perhaps I'll rework it some and see what I can do.

Thanks for the comments this far!

If you were going for 'very real', in my eyes, you didn't quite succeed. It's not too overcooked, but it's strongly HDR, IMHO. When I'm going for enhanced realism, and not quite HDR, I open the best exposed single image in my editing program, and then open the HDR image as a layer on top of the original, then blend the HDR image in at some level of opacity, say 30% or so.

If you just needed to bring out the details in part of the image, I've had success copying the original image into a black and white image, and making that a mask layer for the HDR image, you can then stretch the mask image to get the mask most opaque just over the areas I want to accentuate, then, again, experimenting at blending the HDR image back in at varying levels of opacity.

LightMagic

I actually liked the "painting like" feel of the picture...