Synthetic HDR Gallery
From SarahWiki
Split Rock, Joshua Tree National Park
Cambo Legend 4x5, Better Light Super-6K, 8000x6000x14-bit colour, single capture (approx. 300MB). The original has extreme contrast -- the sun was directly behind the rock, just before sunset. Processed as follows:
- Synthetic HDR plugin, 3% amount, strong noise reduction.
- Changed to 32-bit mode.
- Changed back to 16-bit mode with local adaptation, 1 pixel radius, gamma at maximum, curves unaltered from default (i.e. linear)
- Created levels and curves layers, tweaked until it looked somewhere close
- Created a colour balance layer, tweaked to remove a slight blue cast
- Created a second curves layer, tweaked to darken the sky slightly. Hand-painted mask, then blurred mask with a 250 pixel Gaussian blur filter.
- Did mild sharpening with Smart Sharpen (it didn't need much)
- Duplicated the image layer, applied a 150 pixel Gaussian blur, then set the layer to affect colour only. Created a mask, inverted it, then painted over areas of the plants that had motion artifacts due to fairly strong wind.
- Crop, copy, downsize for web use, slight unsharp mask to help compensate for the (huge) size reduction.
