Old house HDR'ed

[ucci]

Taken at a spot called Costerfield at which there is nothing but farming land and an Antimony mine which has been operating for around 150 years. It is just past Who Cares on the way to Nowhere. It is a locality only now, the old town has long since vanished along with most of its buildings. This is one of the derelict houses still standing.

Taken with a wide angle lens, HDR with 3 exposures ( -2, 0 and +2), processed with photo shop. Weather was very overcast with rain.
Thanks for viewing. Any comments, criticism or invitations to drunken rages gratefully accepted.
Cheers
Old ucci

[Dizzy]

Nice shots Ucci. I like both the color and B&W, but wonder how they would look with a
little bit more color saturation and contrast applied. My only other concern is the "grey
cloud" area that is present if you look past the end porch support pole into the field
beyond. Somehow that doesn't seem to fit in well, and I don't see any other ground fog
around the house.

That is a cool looking old cabin, and I liked the perspective you chose to shoot it from.

Mike

[conkerwood]

Hey Ucci
Agree nice cabin and perspective. Haven't used P.S. for HDR as I use Photomatix Pro all my HDR and it seems to work pretty well. Personal preference is for colour version. I think you have avoided one easy HDR trap in that you haven't let the sky get too unnatural which can happen. Agree you could look at lifting saturation, contrast and a touch of unsharp mask may also help. Only other comment is that even though the cabin is old and possibly leaning the angle of the tree, fence, cabin and ground all combined suggest that the pic is not horizontal, its leaning to the left. A touch of straightening will help.

Regards

Peter

[Colin Southern]

Hi Ken,

HDR techniques are great for compressing a high dynamic range scene into something far more modest that we can print or display - but - the HDR compilation & tone-mapping are still only the first phases ... after that the image STILL needs to be processed like any other image with regards to (especially) levels.

In the examples you've given, you've done a great job of protecting shadow detail - but unfortunately - if you don't have a black point that high enough to "anchor" the black parts of an image, it ends up looking flat.

What I've done here is (starting from the colour version) ...

- raised the black clipping point to force some grey areas to black

- adjusted the midtones to get them where I wanted them

- flicked it through to Photoshop

- applied some dramatic local contrast enhancement (basically high radius USM)

- stretched it to provide a 2:1 aspect ratio

[Mark von Kanel]

Colin you make it all sound soooo easy!!! one could learn to dislike some people love the edit.

[Pebal]

I suggest to increase the local contrast and saturation.

[Crovean]

and level it up a bit.



Then boost the vibrance

[ucci]

Thanx to all who viewed and especially to those who posted comments and who went to the trouble of posting pp suggestions on original post.
Old Ucci