3 Exposures blend in On1 Photo 10

[carloshpvp]

This picture was made from the blend of 3 shots: one exposed for the sky, other for the water/mountains and another for the sand. It was a heavy overcast day with some raindrops and the color were somehow dull. Any advice on how to get better on this kind of photo is welcome.


Nuvens e frio by Carlos Henrique Pereira, on Flickr

[rpcrowe]

I don't know if this is any better but, it is a little different in crop and in structure and saturation

[Geoff F]

Looks good to me, Carlos. The highlights are bright but not over exposed and good shadow detail in the clouds giving plenty of contrast.

How did you do the merge? I have tried several auto HDR programmes but never liked the results so I now hand merge the different shots using layers and masks. Shooting Raw gives me the chance to tweak each shot during conversion (with ACR) before doing the final merging.

[joebranko]

IThe edit with greater saturation is more appealing to me.

[Shadowman]

Nice capture.

[carloshpvp]

Richard, thanks for the saturated example, it looks way better!

Geoff, I developed the 3 RAW files in DxO Optics Pro and exported as *.tif. Inside the On1 Photo I worked with the 3 tiff files as layers, using the masking brush to paint out what I wanted to exclude from each layer and blended all together in the end of the process.

[pnodrog]

Richard, thanks for the saturated example, it looks way better!

Geoff, I developed the 3 RAW files in DxO Optics Pro and exported as *.tif. Inside the On1 Photo I worked with the 3 tiff files as layers, using the masking brush to paint out what I wanted to exclude from each layer and blended all together in the end of the process.

I have always preferred the control and subtly that manually blending with masks achieves. Well done.

[Manfred M]

Carlos - this is a nice image, but is starting to look overprocessed. The colour of the sand and the driftwood just does not seem to fit with the colour of the sky and water. The top 60% of the image says "cool tones" and the bottom 40% suggests "warm tones". Something in my tiny mind rings an alarm bell and suggests something is not right with this image.

As for the technique you have used, it is one I use fairly frequently myself, although I use different tools.

Regardless of the tools you use, the final product has to look "right" to the viewer and this scene just does not seem to do that for me. I suspect a more subtle approach would work better. You were shooting on an overcast day and that has some advantages (soft diffuse lighting that reveals amazing detail) and disadvantages (more subtle tonality and colours).

[carloshpvp]

Carlos - this is a nice image, but is starting to look overprocessed. The colour of the sand and the driftwood just does not seem to fit with the colour of the sky and water. The top 60% of the image says "cool tones" and the bottom 40% suggests "warm tones". Something in my tiny mind rings an alarm bell and suggests something is not right with this image.

As for the technique you have used, it is one I use fairly frequently myself, although I use different tools.

Regardless of the tools you use, the final product has to look "right" to the viewer and this scene just does not seem to do that for me. I suspect a more subtle approach would work better. You were shooting on an overcast day and that has some advantages (soft diffuse lighting that reveals amazing detail) and disadvantages (more subtle tonality and colours).

Manfred, thank you very much for the input on the color temperature. The AWB was something around 5200 K and I changed for 6000 K in all 3 images, so I taught it would be OK. And I can't really tell for sure that the scene looks like it was seen by naked eye as I did it quickly because of the cold wind that hit my ear and left it with a little pain the rest of the day.