CS5 HDR – St Mary & St Finnian

St Mary & St Finnian Church

St Mary & St Finnian Church - CS5 HDR

Well I made the jump to CS5 after having skipped CS4, just don’t see the need to do the upgrade thing for every version. I read a lot about the improved HDR in CS5 and wanted to see if it lived up to the hype…soooo here’s my first experiment with HDR in CS5.

I have to say that it’s not too shabby, to steal one of Tony Sweet’s lines. The reduced noise and the ability to select one image for ghost removal worked pretty good. The tone mapping will take some time to get use to what the sliders do. This is NOT a review of the new HDR features in CS5, just some of my initial observations.

The image above is a 5 image HDR, using 1 stop EV with a D700 and a 24-70mm lens. I tonemapped in CS5 and did a lot of additional processing in CS5. Some processing included, Nik Color Efex Pro plug-in filters, Nik’s Viveza, Topaz Adjust and Simplify and the sky was dropped back in without any of the above filters and worked separately.

Click on image to view larger…

This is an image of St. Mary & St. Finnian Church along the Road to the Isles in Scotland. Somewhere I would surely like to visit again…we’ll see.

Lily of the Valley – Fractalius

Lilly of the Valley - Fractalius

Lilly of the Valley, Fractalius - D700, Lensbaby Composer

Playing around with the fractalius filter this morning, I was trying to get a glowing feel on some of the Lily of the Valley images I shot last week. I kind of like this one…it’s a combination blend of different layers with different fractalius filter effects. Click to view larger…

Orange Poppy

Orange Poppy

Orange Poppy - D700, Lensbaby Composer

The light was really good this morning for shooting flowers in the garden, especially with the Lensbaby Composer. Nice semi-bright overcast skies work well with the Lensbaby, not too much contrast. I used an extention tube and the tele converter to compress the scene to get just the depth of field I was looking for. More things are starting to bloom in the garden, soooo more things to explore…

Here’s a version using the Totally Rad, Dirty Pictures texture plug-in…

Orange Poppy Texturized

Orange Poppy Texturized - D700, Lensbaby Composer

Clematis

Clematis No. 1

Clematis No. 1 - D700, Lensbaby Composer

My wife planted a clematis last year and we didn’t get very many flowers from it…this year IS a different story. Lots of flowers and buds so maybe I’ll get to shoot some more photos of it. Love the color!

Clematis No. 2

Clematis No. 2 - D700, Lensbaby Composer

Ocean Sunrise

Ocean Sunrise

Ocean Sunrise - D700, 24-70mm

Got up at 5:30 this morning to go down to the beach for a sunrise shoot. There was so much moisture in the air from the storms last night that I had trouble keeping the water off the lens. The ocean water temperature was really warm so I waded in for some photos. This is one of the shots right before I left the beach.

Click for a larger view…

Cloudy Day – IR Bike Ride

Magnolia & Spanish Moss

Magnolia & Spanish Moss - D200, IR converted, 18-35mm

It was pretty cloudy today, NOT a good pool or beach day so we went for a bike ride in the morning. Not the normal IR kind of day, big white puffy clouds and hard light, but I took the IR camera anyway to see what I could find. Along the road I spotted this magnolia and some Spanish moss… Continue reading

HDR-IR Pano

HDR-IR Pano

HDR-IR Pano - D200, IR converted, 18-35mm

The clouds were pretty good this morning so I thought I’d try a HDR IR panorama of the view…three sets of four images at each position bracketed in one stop EV. Stitched together in AutoPano Pro and finished off in CS3 with Nik Color Efex Pro.

After the shot we took our morning walk on the beach…click on image for a larger view.