I wanted to try something dramatically different today by branching into the world of HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography. My goal in HDR is to produce realistic images, not the surrealistic type images often associated with HDR. For today's first foray into HDR, I went to Blackstone Gorge along the Blackstone River. The image you see before you is an HDR composite of 7 photographs taken with across a 6 f-stop range of exposures. I used Photomatrix Pro to combine and align the images and to produce the HDR color version. That was saved as a 16-bit TIF.
For the black and white conversion, I loaded the 16-bit TIF in PSE, and since PSE cannot use layers with a 16-bit image, I converted it to an 8-bit per channel image. That was then loaded into my Topaz B&W FX plugin. I applied a classic filter, and then adjusted color sensitivity sliders, adaptive exposure, regions, boost black, boost white, and contrast. Back in PSE, I applied a sepia photo filter and adjusted levels, brightness, and contrast.
@tigerdreamer I've always found outdoor HDR shots to feel soft. In this case, I'd say it's from combining 7 photos into one, so the water motion is captured as is any wind-motion on the leaves in the background. The only things that remain sharp are the stationary objects like the rocks. It's definitely an interesting effect. Personally, I like the B&W better since it feels more dramatic. High contrast b&w is my favorite style. (LOL I doubt that's a surprise to anyone by now!)
