1499 - Debris

Here’s another image from yesterday. It’s Sunday afternoon, I didn’t go out today, and instead of posting both images in the post for yesterday, I split them up. Lazy me 🙂

Two things are interesting here. Firstly, both images were combined to HDR in Photoshop CS3, because neither Photomatix Pro 3 (I didn’t upgrade to 4 so far) nor HDR Essentials could properly align the images. Photoshop could, and indeed it did a marvelous job. I created a 16 bit image by applying a tone curve that retained all highlights and shadows (making the image flat and dull grayish), and from there I worked with Topaz Adjust (presets “Dramatic” and “Spicify”, masks and a lot of local adjustments. It is a little bit more tedious than the dedicated HDR programs, but you have a great deal of control over the results.

The second thing is, that the results for both images were very different. This is what happens when you work on different images, taken only minutes apart. You normally get different results, i.e. results that don’t look like the images were shot in one session. It takes enormous effort to give them a consistent “look”, but fortunately I did not do it for a book or for a side-by-side hanging in a gallery, and so I could spare me the effort and instead try to make the best of each single one.

Dobratsch is that mountain that broke apart in 1348, and that explains why “Debris” from the 1972 Faces album “A Nod Is As Good As A Wink To A Blind Horse” is my Song of the Day. Hear it on YouTube.