I saw this tutorial today on how to fake HDR using Lightroom only. I tried it and it looked awful. So, I decided to play around a little by tweaking the colors a bit.This was taken a little later than the other landscape from Tarpon Lake that I posted a couple days ago. The first one was first thing in the morning while there was still a little bit of mist in the air. When I shot this one, the clouds had come up a little better.
I remembered what Jim's comment about the sky being 1-2 stops lighter than the reflections in the water, so i was careful to let this one look about the same to save the reality "look". To get these colors, I added saturation and exposure to the sky and the water, and added saturation to the boardwalk. The trees were left untouched. I'm pretty happy with the results. What do you all think?
Settings used for this image before post processing were at ISO 200 in aperture priority mode, I shot this at 1/15th at F11. I chose F11 to increase the depth of field. The image was shot with my 18-55mm lens at 21mm.
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2 comments:
I've learned that achieving a good HDR effect that has the 'wow' factor but still looks natural is usually not a quick fix. Often it takes a great deal of experimentation and trial and error to see what works and what doesn't. I find what works on one image may look terrible on another.
That's correct. It sure takes a lot of work and post-processing knowledge to get it just right, so it looks natural. The biggest key is to not over-saturate the colors. That's when it starts to get garish.
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