Joe Grossinger Photography: More On HDR

These are the three images I took of a tree while on a photography tour last November. I was a bit disappointed with the original images and converting them to HDR in CS3 did not make me any happier.

You know how it is, you see something and visualize the completed image in your mind and then comes the huge let down when the image can't live up to what you envisioned.

I just recently started working in HDR again but using CS5's new HDR Pro feature. Now, I am not going to give a course in PS5 HDR Pro, I just want to introduce it and let you see a little bit of what it can do for you.

In this image I adjusted the sliders I did not write about and did not adjust in yesterday's post. The photo realistic preset works well for those images that don't need and should not have a lot of color saturation. However, some images just beg for a bit more color, a bit more definition, a bit better sky. That is how I came to working on those images of the beautiful tree.

That tree came back to haunt me so I decided to give CS5 HDR Pro a go at the images.

As with anything new I tend to get a bit confused and put off by all those switches, buttons, sliders and other highly complicated crap. I don't actually try to learn any of that stuff, it's way too arcane for me. What I did for this image was click on the field called Preset and then scrolled down to a preset called "More Saturated".

That was my starting point. I was still unhappy with the image but now all those switches, buttons, sliders and doohickey's were activated and set to give a saturated image. One by one I adjusted all that complicated crap until I got my image. I love presets!
In actuality there are only 5 sliders I had to work with. By switching back and forth between "Photo realistic", which had little or no color boost and "More Saturated" I was able to see what the experts did to boost the colors.
Sliders are cool, you can just scoot them a little to the left or right, keep a close eye on the picture and then stop when things look right. When I was satisfied with my image, I saved the preset so I would have it again at a later time.

This is my finished tree, just about the way I envisioned it last November.