Back to Fall

In the spirit of contributing, here is one from October. It is Falling Water Creek just up from the Richland Creek Campground. It's a four shot HDR processed in Photomatix. It went back and forth between ACR and CS6 as a smart object. I would like to know some of your workflows and secrets. CC is always welcome.

Beautiful image, Jan. I like the autumn color and the wonderful reflection compliments the foliage nicely. This really looks quite natural and doesn't look like an HDR image. The only nit that I would have is that the bright highlights in the sky do tend to pull my eye out of the frame.

To control dynamic range I have been working with manual blends using Tony Kuyper's luminosity masking channels. I still have a lot to learn but you can check out his tutorials here.

I have also found Sean Bagshaw's tutorials to be helpful as well.

Nice scene and good HDR too. Looks pretty natural on my phone.

Very nice image, Jan. I agree with Brian that the image would be a lot stronger without the bright highlights. I tried an experiment on my computer of visually cropping your image just above the red leaves, left center, and leaving just a touch of the bright sky. This tends to pull my eye down the creek instead of to the bright sky. Just my thoughts, thanks for sharing.

Looks really good to me, but I agree with Tom's suggestion about cropping. One of the things I've always remembered from a past workshop is "A white sky is your enemy."

Thanks guys. I agree with your advice. Brian, I will check out your referrals. I have gotten into a habit of processing most of my shots through Photomatix, although I push the strength and smoothing to the max so it doesn't look much like HDR.

I think the repost is a much stronger image - it really keeps my eyes in the frame.

Jan, this is exactly what I was seeing, much stronger and it will make a good pano print.

This looks really nice Jan, especially the cropped version. Well done.