Santa Ynez Valley Excursion

germaine_sba

I decided to take advantage of the good weather and the three-day weekend, and went over to Santa Ynez yesterday. It was a good thing I did, because today we're overcast and blahhh. It was a Kodak day, and I had a good time snapping away. These are three of my shots that I think came out pretty well. I shot these in RAW, converted them to .tiff's, tone mapped them in Photomatix, and then tweaked them in Photoshop 7.

I'm quite impressed with the tone mapping. I was shooting with a polarizing filter on my Canon 10-22mm lens, and had some very obtrusive vignetting which the tone mapping evened out. I don't think that tone mapping is the answer to all my problems, but I believe it's going to be a very useful tool.

DavidTO

I like the shots, but your heavy hand in processing them is really showing. When you use a brush to blend different curves (or whatever you're using to get there), you need to set it to be infinitely "soft", and as large as you can for the given application. You'll never see your work that way.

We have a tutorial that talks about just this. Hope it helps. Those shots have a lot of potential, IMO.

Nikolai

What David said

DavidTO wrote:

I like the shots, but your heavy hand in processing them is really showing. When you use a brush to blend different curves (or whatever you're using to get there), you need to set it to be infinitely "soft", and as large as you can for the given application. You'll never see your work that way.

We have a tutorial that talks about just this. Hope it helps. Those shots have a lot of potential, IMO.

Shots are nice, but the post-processing is too heavy.
Granted, it's not Beirut, but...

thdizzy

I agree with David and Nikolai (hello guys, it's been a while). I noticed the heavy processing on the first image around the oak and on image 2 arouind the hills. D & N...Is that called 'haloing'? (sp?)