I’ve noticed lots of tutorials popping up on how to use the Adaptive Wide Angle (AWA) feature in (PS) Photoshop CS6. Since I usually like to portray as much realism as I can in my HDR images, I decided to give it a try. It’s certainly much more powerful and interesting than my old standbys, Lens Correction and Free Transform.

So, for this week’s How To Do Stuff (HTDS), I’ve decided to demonstrate how I used PS AWA on this kinda “Faded Glory” image. My first attempts have been pretty successful and I’m sure that after a little more practice, things will get even better.

Starting with a very distorted image (thanks to a 20mm focal length), I’ve included this short video describing how I came up with the image above.

Please check it out if you have a few minutes.

Processing: Five shots from -2 to +2 ev loaded into Nik HDR Efex Pro. I added a small amount of structure to the scene and applied a very smooth, shallow S curve. In Adobe Photoshop, I worked with Hue/Saturation for more realistic colors and then jumped to Highlights/Shadows for a very subtle “Just Beyond Reality” High Dynamic Range effect. . .not too much though. High Pass filter was used for sharpening.

Equipment used: Nikon D700 with 20-35mm f/3.5-4.5 set at 20mm, f/16, ISO 400. Handheld.