The little creek flowing through the Mary Rizor nature preserve has some interesting ice formations that deserve attention. This formation reminded me of the drool that sometimes flows freely from Morgan the Newf's mouth so I was fun with naming this image

. I compiled an HDR image from 4 separate images to capture the dynamic range of the scene. I played around with the curve setting in HDR pro in Cs5 and adjusted the curves for several luminosity masks to perk up the warm tones in the creek and selectively restore the contrast lost through the HDR process. A finally tweaking of brightness and contrast was done as the final step. Let me know what you thing--is this too far over top with HDR? Landscape photography is new for me so I hope to get some good critiques from the gang. Thank you for looking.......................Jim
ps.: I posted another version which has tamer colors and more real in appearance than the original.--JEZ
Comments
3 commentsI think I prefer your original post. I didn't see any issue with color/sat and to me this certainly doesn't look HDR - certainly in the sense when we all think of poorly processed HDR images - this ain't one of them.
I think you've framed and capture this well. I do think there's a bit going on and not really close enough to make those ice formations more of a center piece. Overall though, this is captured nicely.
The repost seems like it's actually missing some color. The only nit/suggestion I have applies to both versions. I think the grass/leaves in the LL do seem like shadow recovery has gone too far. I think a burn and/or combined with some increase in contrast might do the trick. If anything, I guess that's the area where maybe HDR processing is noticeable.
Lon