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I promised Daniela and others some time ago that I would publish a "before and after" and try to talk you through my processes, so before you pour over this picture, take a long look at the original.
With this shot the camera's settings were aperture priority, auto white balance, and auto iso, I had set the self timer to ten seconds and placed the camera on the ground as the ducks came waddling down the path alongside the River Tyne in Corbridge. As you can see from the original it looks pretty flat and lifeless, the conditions were relatively dull and overcast and fairly damp after some showers. So how did I "rescue" it?
From the RAW file I made three new .dng files at two stop intervals -2EV, 0EV, and +2EV, these were then taken into Photomatix to make a pseudo HDR .jpg using pretty high light smoothing and micro contrast to retain the realistic look that I was after, this became my working document in Photoshop.
The next stage in Photoshop was to make a new adjustment layer and tweak the curves for a little extra contrast, and then another adjustment layer to slightly increase the saturation, then I flattened.
Next, I duplicated the layer and using Quick Mask I made a selection of the two ducks, hit ctrl and j to set them on their own layer, then turned off the visibility. Now moving to the layer below I used the Nik Viveza 2 plug in to gently adjust the "structure" of the whole picture. Now returning to the "ducks" layer I used the Smart Sharpen to give them just a little more definition , almost done now.
I flattened the image once more and duplicated the layer, this new layer was for the final dodge and burn to increase the dynamic contrast and add some greater interest to the light. I find it best to dodge and burn on a separate layer in case you overdo it, the layer can easily be deleted and you can start again. I use a very soft edged large brush when I dodge and burn, set the parameters like this: dodge, set to highlights and 5% opacity, burn, set to shadows and 7% opacity. Dodging lightens highlight areas, and burning darkens shadow areas, when used with these settings. Just brush gently over the areas where you want to accentuated the light (dodging) or darken the shadows for extra contrast (burning), each pass of the brush adds to the effect, so go easy.
Once I was happy with the outcome all I needed to do was rotate and straighten the top layer and make my final crop, thus losing the area of sky in the top left corner and bringing the ducks closer to the viewer. Flatten the image and then I was finished.
Seems like a lot of work? Well perhaps thirty minutes, but I hope you agree that it was half an hour well spent, it also shows that HDR doesn't have to look outlandish!
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@Sonia Nansid: Imagenomic's Noiseware plug in is my choice, I doubt that you will find a better product, if you cannot afford the plug in the free stand alone Noiseware Community Edition is very good too.
@M@ndy: Some more masculine humour tomorrow M@ndy
PENTAX K100D
1/20 second
F/5.6
ISO 200
18 mm