The Sage of Shadowdale
Little Bay rocks
3xp manual blend
A lot of post production fiddling in this one - made attempts, and abandoned them, with PhotoMatix (both tone mapping & shadow/highlight blending) and CS3 (local adaptation) before just opening the -2EV exposure (mainly for the sky), overlaying the 0EV & 2EV exposures in layers on top, masking them out completely and then just brushing them back in on the foreground shadowy areas very slowly & gently (5% opacity at a time). Still not happy with the halo around the sun, but that was too hard to completely correct in post and I'll blame the lens' poor "shooting into the sun" characteristics for that. ;-)
Took a lot of fiddling with tone curves too and I'm still not happy with the colours in the sky; I increased midtone contrast with a curve but wasn't happy with what it did to the colour saturation so I changed the blend mode to luminosity on that layer and added a separate saturation/hue layer to control colour saturation directly but....
Don't know why I've gone into so much detail in this description. I don't usually. Hmmm... Oh well, back to work now.
Highest explore position: 487
Little Bay rocks
3xp manual blend
A lot of post production fiddling in this one - made attempts, and abandoned them, with PhotoMatix (both tone mapping & shadow/highlight blending) and CS3 (local adaptation) before just opening the -2EV exposure (mainly for the sky), overlaying the 0EV & 2EV exposures in layers on top, masking them out completely and then just brushing them back in on the foreground shadowy areas very slowly & gently (5% opacity at a time). Still not happy with the halo around the sun, but that was too hard to completely correct in post and I'll blame the lens' poor "shooting into the sun" characteristics for that. ;-)
Took a lot of fiddling with tone curves too and I'm still not happy with the colours in the sky; I increased midtone contrast with a curve but wasn't happy with what it did to the colour saturation so I changed the blend mode to luminosity on that layer and added a separate saturation/hue layer to control colour saturation directly but....
Don't know why I've gone into so much detail in this description. I don't usually. Hmmm... Oh well, back to work now.
Highest explore position: 487