Smith Rock HDR

During a recent trip to Smith Rock, I took several sets of bracketed shots with the intention of doing some HDR with the high contrast, late morning scenes. This was the only one with an interesting enough composition for me to go ahead and process it. I have another version with a lighter touch on micro-contrast, but it was not as interesting.

Canon 7D, Sigma 10-20mm at 10mm
f/16, 1/30th and 1/60th processed in Photomatix
LR for levels and curves
Color Efex for micro tonal contrast

Hi Marylynne, This is an interesting HDR. I can see that it worked pretty well, but I also can tell it's an HDR, which is my only complaint. I think the processing did what you wanted. I like the setting and the sky. It's definitely a candidate for HDR and it's nice to see you experimenting with the technique.

I like the composition here Marylynne. The rocks/sky/trees work very well together. The HDR processing looks pretty good to me. The image has a nice dynamic range but doesn't look overly processed like most of the HDR stuff out there on the web. There is a bit of perspective distortion (trees are falling back/inward) here from tilting the lens upward that you could probably correct in PS if you wanted to.

Thanks, David and Scott. I have another version of this with even less hdr effect...it's basically just two tonemapped images without much micro-contrast, but it looked somewhat flat (this particular rock face is a tricky one to get well)

I use LR, and I'm not sure it has a tool for perspective distortion. The parallax effect was almost unavoidable from this spot (10mm focal length, shooting tall rock faces at close range...between Smith Rock and a hard place!) I'll check LR to see if I've missed something, but I've also be thinking about getting Elements for a few things it does that LR doesn't do.