Over the Milestone

Much better than your first blend. The blend looks pretty good, just have to work on avoiding the halos. We'll cover how to avoid halos in our next session.

Cheers

This is breathtaking. The hint of color in the clouds reflected in the snow and the blue shadows compliment each other nicely. I really like the snow laden tree on the left but IMO the one on the right adds too much weight to that side of the image.

Sounds good Zack !

Thanks for the comments Nancy. Shooting these mountain summit areas with snow covered trees is a challenge similar to shooting in a rainforest

Lovely image. A novel angle and delightful light. Evocative of what the finest of nature is all about.

At first glance, the beauty of the scene and the real nice comp makes it easy to overlook the techs, but since you're looking for input--you're gonna get it Its next to impossible to suggest the corrections without knowing exactly your steps here, so ill just point out the problems. Individually, theyre barely noticeable, but taken together the image starts to suffer. The fg snow exposure looks pretty good, but the sky overall is a bit too dark. There are some minor haloes around the trees--sounds like Zack has that covered. It's the discontinuites that are most troublesome here--for example the sky around the sun is too dark--if you look at the clouds to the left of the tree theyre brighter than the clouds around the sun--not good. Sometimes its better to just let the highlights be a bit blown if thats what it takes to achieve a smooth and natural look. There's also a lack of clarity or contrast in the trees, which i imagine is due to whatever technique you used for the blend. Its not bad for a first effort, but frankly it takes many hundreds of shots to even begin to nail these kind of blends--backlit trees are probably the toughtest HDR subjects out there--so to take this on without doing some easier stuff first is probably a bit counterproductive (besides being a bit masochistic
) But im sure youll be a fast learner, and youve got some great subjects to work on.

I'd darken down the halo's on the right tree. I think your composition is great, and the color palette is alluring. Nice work.

Yes, stan is spot on in his assessment here. Tonality balancing is the hardest thing to master when blending exposures in photoshop. You really have to develop your eye to notice tonality balance. This is something you learn with experience.

You learn fast and will pick it up pretty quickly I think.

Stan, thanks for the input This is what I was looking for. I am sure it will take me some time to get a good grip on how to process these type`s of image blends..

Zack, thanks again!

Pretty good, James. Good advice from the others here, keep working at it. I'm really looking forward to some more outings.

I like the Dr. Seuss character to this both in the colors and the undulating landscape. Really like the snow color. Blending looks really good.

Thanks Tony & Adam for the comments

I will be reposting later today with some changes.

After working with Zack again today, I was able to address the short comings in the processing and blending of my image. Any comments are welcome; Stan