My sincere gratitude to Frank and Taffy for their suggestions and guidance as I try to learn the intricacies of HDR photos. As per Taffy's suggestion that I get some photos of "Architecture", we went to Balboa Island, camera & tripod in hand, and, at 3 bracketed photos per shot, 2 ea for jpg and RAW, I opened the memory card to find over 1000 images...LOTS to choose from!
I spent over an hour on one image before discovering there is a glitch in the software I'm using (Googled & found others with the same problem). Began again and took a different direction, but just couldn't use a multi-million dollar cottage when I had a loving cat to photograph! He wears his lifestyle well, doesn't he?
Once again, any suggestions you can give for more improvement will be gratefully accepted and applied. Even this far is a great stride from yesterday, I think. Thanks for the moral support and assistance!
@taffy@frankhymus Stage Two... I have *a lot* of cottages, Taffy, but I tripped over a cat along the way... We'll work on that "glitch" in the Photoshop software, Frank. Did you ever encounter it? Both Ken & I are also checking out Photomatrix...it's far more reasonable than I'd suspected, so thanks! (Frank, do you use both? You mentioned them both to me earlier.) Thanks again!
Great capture - well seen, looks like a ships cat on shore leave! FAV
Out of interest I use Photomatix and find it much easier that Photoshop for HDR but I'm still at the base of the learning curve, real Photoshop officianados probably do much better with PS!
@Weezilou What glitch would that be? I use Photoshop when I merge brackets. Works fine for what I want to do, especially as I want to bring the result into Camera Raw in 32 bit mode. I did a free trial of Photomatix, but went no further with it.
Well I must give you credit Louise, you are up to the challenge, and it seems to me you will have it mastered after a few more trips around the area. Ken, get ready for a few day trips LOL. I know you are in it for the haul.
@frankhymus@lisatown Thank you both for the comments and interest in my "journey". The Glitch... At Frank's suggestion, I open my RAW, bracketed images in 32 bit where there's nothing much to tweak...open that to PS & save the image as .tif The Glitch happens when I *try* to now open that image in ACR. I get that as an option, but nothing happens. We Googled, & got this info about one option for getting around the problem, but these answers help explain also: https://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=nzpGJRP-daA (For this, I went back to opening the 3 images in PS HDR, selected 16 bit and then was able to go from there to achieve this.) Frank, I'll add that "the problems" are a nice way to learn as well. Thanks for your help! Lisa, you may have better luck with that older version!
Bless your heart for all the time and effort you're putting in to achieving this learning goal. What a trooper! Trust me, with each question you ask, I look for the shared answers with equal interest. Thank you for asking the questions. Such a good pic of the kitty. I like how the pillar (?) he's against fills the right edge of the picture, creating a border the keeps the view from wandering out of the image.
@lyndemc Oh Denise I'm delighted that you and others are gleaning information from all this! I thought I was the last kid on the block to seek out the information! Were it not for my PS glitch (that happens to others as well) I fully understand what I've been told...it's just up to me to study and hone the skill. Along the way I get sidetracked trying all the "pretty techniques", but it keeps me busy and in touch with friends here (: Thanks, as always, for stopping by, commenting and sharing!
Out of interest I use Photomatix and find it much easier that Photoshop for HDR but I'm still at the base of the learning curve, real Photoshop officianados probably do much better with PS!
Good luck with your HDR project.