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I would love some feedback on this one.
This image started out as five separate RAW photos of a pine forest taken during a four hour hike. The images were bracketed to cover 4 f-stops from -2 to +2, inclusive. I processed these as follows:
1) Imported all five images into Oloneo PhotoEngine and created a natural looking HDR, which I exported as a single tiff;
2) Opened the HDR tiff in ACDSee Pro 5 where I added some sharpening and converted it to B&W before re-exporting as a tiff.
3) Finally, I imported the B&W tiff into Xara Designer Pro 7, applied a mask, adjusting the top and bottom thirds of the photo with increased blur and contrast moving outward in the form of a gradient transparency. This means that the central third of the photo is very sharp and crisp with lots of dynamic range, but the top and bottom edges are quite blurry and contrasty with very little dynamic range.
The idea I had was to visually draw one into the forest by bringing your eye to the focussed and crisp center third of the photo. I also wanted to tip my hat to the early days of photography when lens technology tended to result in images with crisp central regions and soft edges.
So, what do you folks think? Does the image work overall, and do the adjustments achieve what I was aiming for?