Tag Archives: HDR Efex Pro

HDR – The Dog with A Lady on A Beautiful Morning

I got this HDR image of The Dog with her Lady a year ago (Memorial Day 2012) in Washington, North Carolina. I had spotted her earlier in that town when the weather was much cooler, But this time, as you can see, everything was beautiful. The weather was perfect.

Processing: Five exposures from -1.5 to .5 ev were loaded into Nik HDR Efex Pro where I enhanced the image by selectively adding structure to the lower part of the image while subtracting structure from the sky. The nice thing about Eastern North Carolina is that the natural colors always look great. I actually had to de-saturate the sky in this photo for a more realistic look.

To get a sharp but smooth look, I saved the image with Adobe Photoshop. After using the Adaptive Wide Angle tool to correct some extreme distortion from the 20mm focal length, I saved the image and reloaded it into Adobe Camera Raw. I increased the clarity a little and added sharpening and luminence for noise reduction. As with most of my recent images, I used my final process to create the printable version by enlarging, using high pass filter and then re-sizing to a 36 x 24 print size.

I created the monochrome version by loading the final color image into Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 and applying an Agfa film preset. I finished by applying a linear contrast curve in Photoshop for more tonal depth.

Equipment used: Nikon D700 with 20-35mm f/3.5-4.5 set at 20mm, f/16, ISO 200. Handheld.

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HDR – Please Do Not Sit or Climb

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This HDR image was taken in New Bern, North Carolina on an incredibly beautiful day. And yes, you can’t sit or climb on the New Bern Bears. Still, it’s fun to find them all over the down town area.

I’m on another roll of doing color and monochrome versions. This one has lots of contrast.

Processing: Nine exposures loaded into Nik HDR Efex Pro for a simple blending and structuring of the bush and tree areas. The image was saved to Adobe Photoshop and then reopened in Camera Raw where I added some vibrance and clarity along with sharpening and luminance for noise reduction. After re-opening the image in Photoshop, I moved it into Nik Viveza 2 for color enhancements. My final step was to add a Curves preset for linear contrast for that realistic depth. The Monochrome version was done with Nik Silver Efex Pro 2.

For both images I applied my final process to bring out more clarity. I take the processed image, create a new layer in Photoshop and re-size to 40 x 26.667 inches. Then I use Filter > Other > High Pass and set Radius to 8 Pixels. I apply this by setting the blending mode for the layer to Soft Light. I work with the percentage of interior opacity for the layer to get the exact, final effect. For this image, I used 70%.

You may wonder why I start with an 8 pixel setting. Well, through experience, I’ve found that anything above 8 gives me too much brittleness. And by working with the opacity, I can choose a level that works for any type of image.

After applying the final step, I re-size the image; first to 36 x 24 inches for print versions and then down to web publication size of 10 x 6.667 inches. In the past, I used a resolution of 300 pixels/inch but recently have been using 240 pixels/inch with excellent results.

Equipment used: Nikon D700 with 20-35 mm f/3.5-4.5 lens at 35mm, ISO 400, Manfrotto/Bogen tripod and ball head.