Tag Archives: classic

pseudo-HDR – Inner Beauty from The 50s

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Since moving to North Carolina, I haven’t had a chance to attend any car shows. I guess life just gets in the way. So, I’m posting a shot that I took back in Saint Louis, Missouri a few years ago. This was before my jump into High Dynamic Range imaging but I’ve applied a small amount of HDR tone mapping to get a slight “beyond reality” effect. Or what I call, a pseudo-HDR image. This Chevy was beautifully restored. Can you tell what year?

For an artistic version, I move the image into Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 and deepened the reds while lightening the yellows for just a little more contrast. Then, back in Photoshop, I blended the monochrome layer at 95 percent to allow a slight hint of color.

Equipment used: Nikon D100 with 20-35 mm f/3.5-4.5 lens at 31mm(effective 46mm) f/18, ISO 200.                                                                                                                57

pseudo-HDR – A Classic in Purple

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I usually prefer classic cars in Concours condition but this beauty was too much to pass up; candy purple with pinstriping, chrome rims with baby moons, blackwalls and custom tail lights.  Whoa!!  And the surrounding area at Laclede’s Landing in St. Louis, Missouri made for a perfect environmental portrait.

This was at one of the many classic car shows that are held in St. Louis. When I lived there, I made sure to attend every show. I’m still looking for the shows here on the East Coast.  I would really appreciate any suggestions

Processing: I used Nik HDR Efex Pro for full out, single shot tone mapping to produce a strong pseudo-HDR, a little over the edge image and then used Adobe Photoshop to tone down the surrounding areas. This made the car really stand out.

As an after thought, I decided to process this second photo of the tail light using just HDR Toning and got a very good, matching shot.  These images were taken with a Nikon N90s and 28-70mm f/2.8 lens using Fuji Velvia slide film. Those were my main tools before digital along.

Flaming Ford – pseudo-HDR

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Having used Adobe Photoshop for many years, I’ve been able to work an image for a pseudo-HDR effect since long before High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging became popular with many photographers. This image was produced from a single exposure that was originally shot using Fuji Chrome Velvia slide film and scanned at a high resolution. After minor adjustments in Adobe Camera Raw, I loaded it into Nik HDR Efex Pro and applied the number 24, Clean City 1 preset. I’ve included the original scan at the end of this post for comparison.

As far as composition, I always like to get close at car shows for more abstract views like this one. I wasn’t totally satisfied with my first attempt (still too realistic) so I loaded the image back into HDR Efex Pro and did lots of “on the fly” tone mapping to get the image below.This is a much better example of what lots of photogs think of when HDR is mentioned. And that’s sad since my normal use of the technology is to get a better view of reality than a camera can produce in a single shot. And this is still pretty calm compared to some of the more extreme examples that I’ve seen. Can we mention the “halo” effect? :-)

Here’s the original image from the scanned transparency.Equipment used: Nikon n90s with 28-70mm f/2.8 lens.