Light Box

I recently purchased a light box, essentially a light bulb with some hard opaque white plastic wrapped around it. It is a simple yet effective way of tracing, though that is not the purpose for which I have it, I got a light box for back lighting translucent macro subjects. Less of these words more of the pictures!

This was just a first rushed attempt but you can compare this picture to the originals I took against a plain white background.

Exposure Fusion

You may recognise this picture from my previous post -

Input

I  used Photoshop to create 4 +/- exposures of the same image and introduced it to Photomatix pro,  -

Final Image

and then another, more extreme example using 2 input images:

Input1

Input2

Final Image

HDR round 2

I have just purchased Photomatix pro - In my opinion worth the discounted £63 I paid for it using the following discount coupon to reduce the price by 20%  'kelbytraininghdr'  you may remember my earlier post HDR in which I gave a preview of what the program is capable of in terms of recovery of too far underexposed or overexposed shots.


Well I thought I might just whip out a quick post showing the results with the non watermarked full definition version on some old pictures that I have probably posted before but anyway - here they are...


Original:

After HDR processing:

Dramatic Skies

Clouds are trickey subjects, they usually end up white and washed out or grey and boring. Either way they are generally lacking definition and are rarely as exciting as they can look to the eye. So I decided to try and get something more from those fluffly seas of gass:

Original








 Tone compression








Details enhanced

HDR

High Dynamic range, gives you more highlights in the shadows and more definition in the lights. Essentially the best of both an under exposed shot and an over exposed shot in one picture. I recently discovered Photomatix a very powerful program for combining over and underexposed shots to give such a result.

There are many, many effects that can be given using this program, producing a whole plethora of results.

I have only had it for about 2 hours so here are my very first attempts the shot before and the shot after:

I was going for the grainy/gritty/grunge type look and I was fairly pleased

Took an over exposed, washed out image and added a bit of dynamic range :)