HDR images taken at Three Sisters, Katoomba, NSW.
During my 4 day stay in the Blue Mountains it was only the first afternoon on the day of our arrival that we had clear skies and weather so I was lucky to be able to get a photo of the formation.
The unconventional portrait oriented image provides a lovely look at the Three Sisters formation, the distant escarpment with the red glow of the setting sun on the rocks and the sky and the lovely blue sky. I purposely chose to ignore the rule of thirds and allowed the horizon to be in the centre of this shot. It displays the point of interest, Three Sisters, the vista of the landscape and importantly the sunset colours of the sky and especially for the non-Australian viewer the much under appreciated blue in the sky of this wonderful land. The vast majority of images seen of this rock formation are oriented in the landscape format and I fell my treatment provides a different look and will cause the viewer to pause a little longer to look at it rather than skip over the image with an "I've seen that before." attitude. This is the image for my assignment submission.
The more traditional view of the Three Sisters in the 'standard' post card view. Lovely photo but to my mind not as enticing as the protrait oriented version. Both final images demonstrate my competentcy in the HDR method. Images were initially imported into LightRoom, catalogued and metadata added, then merged to HDR in Photoshop CS5. I was surprised to find so much dust/dirt visible in the sky from my sensor considering it has a self-cleaning feature each time it is turned off. Time for a senor wet cleaning, maybe something else that needs to be included in this course.
HDR images taken of the ActewAGL building from Garema Place in civic at sunrise.
Images were imported to LR3 and then combined using PS5 HDR software. Image ev +0.58, 0.00, -0.68.
Settings used:
- Ghost removal box checked
- Glow Edge: Radius 25 px, Strength 0.53 (these are the default settings) moved the sliders but saw no improvement so stayed with default.
- Gamma 1.00
- Exposure 1.10 raised slightly to brighten image
- Detail 164% raised to show more detail
- Shadow 0% raising slider to 100% added some shadow to some windows but I didn't feel there was a need to alter the shadows
- Highlights 46% I felt the highlights were a bit muddy so raised them
- Vibrancy increased to 53% I wanted stronger colours in the image
- Saturation increased to 27% I wanted stronger colours in the image
- I used the curves adjustment to brighten the dark areas and darken the sky a bit
When the image was merged with the above settings I straightened, cropped and adjusted the levels. I had intended to use the Unsharp Mask in PS5 but for some reason the preview would not display so I saved the image back to LR3 and then sharpened it there.
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| Completed HDR |
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| Electric Power substation Oakes Estate |
