Fall Colors in Fort Worth Japanese Garden

While most of the world was out shopping on Friday I spent a rainy morning in the Japanese Garden here in Fort Worth.

I was playing around with the processing of the image in an attempt at a homemade HDR to cut down on the blownout sky. So in ACR I dropped the exposure a bit, upped the recovery and fill light both to 100%, then pumped up contrast and vibrance too.

Does it go into the realm of unreal? I'll post back with a more normal version to compare.

And a more normal process.

Photo looks fine. Not unnatural.

Beautiful place to take photos. Just don't take a tripod with you or you will be charged to photograph as a professional. I visited the Japanese Garden in July and made a slideshow of the images. All shot with a little Canon SX100 IS. Viewable at my page on Vimeo: http://www.vimeo.com/revcurmudgeon/

You've captured much of the dynamics of an HDR image in your home made processing Darren. The image could certainly stand on its own merits were one not privey to the post processing done. Possibly a bit more saturation in the reds? Good work to recover this shot! Thanks for sharing your technique.

Photomatix is really useful software for HDR. I downloaded a copy a couple months back. Works pretty neat once you understand its approach to doing HDR. Worth a look.

I think you did a fine job. To me there appears to be more depth in your HDR version than in the "normal" version, especially in the tree.