Grimes Canyon Sunset HDR

[Kerry Perkins]

Captured in a nice little canyon in southern California near my home. The red rock in the cliffs is quarried and sold as decorative rock. Below the cliffs they also quarry sand and aggregate.

Five image HDR shot with my 50D and a 50mm f/1.8 lens (the plastic toy!).

[Julie Brown]

Kerry, the sky is very interesting, but I'm not sure about the color. Did you have more sky in the crop-it feels to me like it needs a bit more room.

[Kerry Perkins]

Julie, I do have more sky in the original. The balance of foreground, background, and sky seems to elude me every time. :o I guess the only way to learn is to keep posting...

[Dave Mills]

Hi Kerry, Very dramatic sky with the hdr working well in balancing the exposure. The comp is well balanced approx 1/3-2/3. Not sure about the color either but I wasn't there. More foreground interest would have added to the images strength....

[Robert Amoruso]

Kerry,

I agree with the others. THe color looks off and the FG needs to be stronger. I bit lower, brighter with increased contrast and perhaps local contrast enhancement to bring out the details in the rock.

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Kerry,
A good bit of the whites look blown in the sky.....see if you can go back and recover the highlights b4 converting/merging. Wanna have some fun.....post the OP tiff.....whites saved and maybe a midtone one.....give us a whack at it!

[Kerry Perkins]

Roman, neither LR nor PS CS4 shows any clipped whites. Not sure what you want me to post?

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Kerry,
Interesting. When I pulled the jpeg in CS2 it showed the whites clipped and so did BreezeBrowser. Are you talking original tiff/Raw? If so then it was introduced in PP'ing.....most likely culprit contrast boost (it has a nasty habit of doing that!).....I've circled the area that shows up for me. I think you could also patch the area in with the yellow/golden tones too w/o losing much .....if you are OK with such things.

[Kerry Perkins]

There is something strange going on and I would love to know what it is! Here is a screen shot of my CS4 workspace and the histogram. Note the grayscale below the image that I use as a reference. The white bar on the right is 255,255,255. Using the "info" tool in PS on the sunset image, I can't find anything over 239. I also used the Mac "digital color meter" on the image as posted right on the BPN site and it doesn't show anything over 239. Is my computer broken? LR2, PS CS4 and the OS all tell me the highlights are ok. Any idea what is going on?

[Roman Kurywczak]

I'm at a loss too Kerry! Must be the jpeg compression then??? Remember....that's what I'm using! Hisogram on your looks right.....mine has a spike on right.