Painted Hills pt. 1

I spent some time at the Painted Hills a couple of weeks ago and finally got around to processing some of my shots. I'll dish one out every few days as I work on them.

This one is a 4 shot HDR processed through Photomatix Tone Compressor tonemapping operator. I usually use the Details Enhancer operator instead, but for this one, Tone Compressor was better. If anyone has insights on how to know in advance which one will have a better effect, let me know.

The four shots were not as widely dispersed along the ev as they could/should have been (been reading up on that again too), but I liked the intensity of the color and light I got from that shots I used.

Marylynne, this is nice, for an hdr shot this has a very natural look to it, well done.

Hi Marylynne, Beautiful colors here... I might think about cropping down half the sky, and bring some more of the focus into the rest of the scene. Maybe crop out the right most part of the irrigation that stops before the end of the frame.
Also, I'm not sure why this scene would need to be a 4 shot blended HDR image? One shot should handle the light range displayed in a mid day scene like this.

Thanks, Rick. I'm going to take another bite out of that pipe at the end and crop it further. I thought about reducing the sky too, but I wasn't sure.

Regarding the HDR use, I had planned to go for something a bit different, so I loaded the 4 images into Photomatix and then decided I didn't like the unnatural level of detail and texture, so I used Tone Compressor (in other words, I took a broad range and then compressed the range rather than expanding and preserving it). I was joking with a friend that I was spending way too much time making HDR look like a single, well exposed shot when, well, I had a single well exposed shot right there in the middle of my bracket.

I did lots of bracketed shots that day because it was very bright and I couldn't tell from the lcd whether I got the exposure the way I wanted to. I ended up mid-day changing the lcd to show both a preview and the histogram side-by-side so I could see what was happening graphically. I might try to play with the best exposure (slightly to the right of 0ev) and see if I can get as rich a result in colors. If so, I will have learned my lesson, if not, I'll be retaining my excuse to make others fold laundry while "I'm in the middle of a complex tonemapping session."

Hi Marylynne, Rick makes some great suggestions. I think it's just a tad too saturated, another thing to be careful with in HDR. You did create a realistic scene from the four images though, so my compliments. I haven't yet mastered HDR, everything I do turns out unrealistic.

As I look at it, I kind of think the sky's a bit too blue, maybe the rest is not oversaturated...I like the scene and remember it from my recent trip there. Nicely done.

Thanks, everyone. I did a re-do (cropped a bit off the top and right, reduced saturation a tad in the blue and red). I could desaturate a bit more, but I didn't intentionally boost saturation (it's a product of the tone compressor operator, I think). I wanted to keep enough saturation to generate that wow sense of being there, but not so much that it looks unrealistic. Let me know if more desaturation is a good idea given that goal. I do use a laptop (albeit in a dark corner) so I might need to look at this at my work monitor to see how it looks there.

Much better, I like this s lot.

The re-post looks great Marylynne. I like a vertical crop concentrating on the wheel and the painted hills behind too.

Here is a vertical version. I'm kinda funny about non-standard aspect ratios, but 8x 10 was the widest and shortest I could get. I have this problem with wanting to include too much, so this is a good experiment. I'll post some of the longer focal length shots I took (inspired in part by David Bostock's postings last month).

Sure like the vertical repost! Crop out more of the sky on that one and you've got it made. I see a little echo of the wheel in a circle in the stubble field at left center; how about adding a little local contrast to punch that up a bit? Just a thought. Well seen scene ( ); I'm eager to see more.

Thanks, Catherine. I hadn't noticed the circle in the stubble. I'll play with that.

I like the last version the best. My only nit is that the sky appears to have just a little too much magenta on my monitor. If you can fix the sky, I think you have a winner here. I think I remember you saying you are using lightroom 3. I would play with the HSL blue and aqua sliders to fix the sky.

Thanks, Scott. That's an easy fix. It's funny how simply saying "magenta" I can see it, even though I couldn't before. Your eyes are well tuned.