I find myself being more and more drawn to high contrast compositions. Perhaps I enjoy blinding myself while looking through my viewfinder into the sun as it sets over a peak, or maybe I just like making processing as complicated as possible. Probably both. Of course, most of these situations call for some form of tone-mapping, which I'm perfectly comfortable with. I went the graduated filter route for a while, but rare was the instance when I found myself working with a flat horizon, and I still found myself doing a crazy amount of dodging or burning in order to get the contrasting areas to cohesively work together. Stacking and hand-blending images in PS can get tedious fairly quickly, and I still had the problem of merging contrasting tones in a natural way. I gave Photomatix a try for a spell, but I couldn't get anything to not come out wonky and over-baked. Frustrated, I was ready to return to the hand-blending route when I stumbled upon a program called SNS-HDR. Simply put, It's the best HDR software that I've played with yet--very intuitive and simple UI, minimal ghosting, the ability to layer and mask--and most importantly, results come out
au natural. Dropped $38 for it, and I'd say it was worth every penny. Check it out here:
http://www.sns-hdr.com/
The three bracketed images:
As you can tell, my brightest image was a still a bit dark--ideally those shadows would have a
little more detail in them. Ah well. After SNS did it's thing, I imported directly into PS 6, where the rest of the magic happened. For dodging and burning (and now, sharpening too), I use and fully endorse a set of actions developed by Tony Kuyper. Based on luminosity masks, they more or less allow you to isolate tonal ranges in your image and work on them and only them. Makes the native dodge and burn tool in PS feel and look like a stone tool. Read the tutorial here:
http://goodlight.us/writing/luminositymasks/luminositymasks-1.html. Highly, highly recommended. Once I feel the tones are all straightened out, I'll make any local saturation adjustments that are needed--sometimes with the saturation tool, sometimes with selective color. If things feel right, I'll save my progress as a TIFF file, and be ready for the final step: sharpening. In the past I've either relied on the Marc Adamus technique (resize, sharpen, sharpen, resize) or used Smart Sharpen, depending on the image. But lately I've been taking advantage of another one of Tony Kuyper's actions--this one for sharpening--and have been loving it. Anyhow, here's the final result:
