Before & After 453

The game will last 7 Days and whoever can produce the best edited image (as judged by me) will be picked and it'll be their turn to post their unedited picture for all of us to take a crack at.

The participants must have their "Image Editing OK" turned on and they must provide at least a simple breakdown of how they edited the image, some entrants are a little vague on this point, please give us all details so we can learn and share tips. For instance if you use the unsharp mask tool or Smart Sharpen, provide us with the adjustments you used so others can try them out.

You can post multiple images, but the first image you post will be the one that is judged - all other images will be considered for knowledge and tip use only.
Feel free to comment and/or ask questions at any time. This is a good competition for learning new methods, so let's make it a bit more dynamic. I will be judging edits, not comments. Feel free to comment on the original image as well.

If you happen to be the winner of the game please start the next one with the title of the game and the following number. For example…the next game should read "Before & After 454."

Submissions end Sunday, 30th December, 2012 at 12:00 GMT+1 and a winner will be announced.

RAW File here

Opened in Camera RAW and made a number of adjustments for blacks and whites, vibrance and clarity. Sharpened, then opened in CS6 and made 3 images, one with existing exposure, one at -2EV and another at -8EV then combined to HDR composite and smart sharpened.

Where was this shot taken? Lots of ship traffic out there.

Started in ACR 7.1, used max highlight recovery for sky, slight shadow recovery for cliff side, +15 Clarity.

In Photoshop, a few masked Levels adjustment layers to D&B targeted areas, some saturation increase. Cloned out all but one ship. Added a slight blue to the water.

Brought that into SNS-HDR, adjusted for a bit more detail in sky and cliff side. Layered the SNS version onto the Photoshop version, reduced opacity and masked for targeted areas.

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Was going for a sunny day look:

Created 2 additional copies of the original. Used additional copy layers with multiply and screen blend types to make the light and dark exposures. Blended with HDR in PSP X4 with very minimal adjustment.

Slight saturation boost and resize in photoscape.

M_Six wrote in post #15399518
Where was this shot taken? Lots of ship traffic out there.

It was in Algeria.

So, coming in from another thread, yb98 here was interested in how it's possible to fix the image without using exposure blending or other fancy trickery to optimize dynamic range in a shot like this. You need to have Capture One 7 or Lightroom 4 to be able to recover the highlights and shadows to this extent.

I first opened the image in CO7 and set the gamma curve to linear, which got the highlights down most of the way, but I also dialed in +50 highlight and +40 shadow recovery. I also did a small shift of the mid tones and a tiny saturation bump. Export as 16-bit tiff.

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Two conversions in LR4:
1. Exposure 0, Highlights -100, Shadows +100
2. Exposure -2.5, Highlights 0, Shadows 0
Both with Camera Landscape, Clarity 40, Vibrance 50

Fusion + Smooth Compressor tone mapping in Dynamic HDR 5.3.

My attempt. Mainly used the LCC tool in CO7 and opened the midtones with levels.

chris_holtmeier wrote in post #15414836
My attempt. Mainly used the LCC tool in CO7

I didn't know this image had a white shade to go with it You know what LCC is for, right?

Kolor-Pikker wrote in post #15419561
I didn't know this image had a white shade to go with it You know what LCC is for, right?

I know what it was designed for, but it can also be used to open up deep shadows. Turn off color cast, and set level to 8-15%.

Hmm, that would've been useful back when the shadows tool used to suck, but the results seem to be roughly the same.

While each tool performs the function of targeting the darkest portions of an image, the results are very different.

Thanks to everyone who participated.

NigelD : lots of details there. However I think it's too much for a photo. May be it would be nice to push the effect further and try to make it like a painting.

RedCrown : nice natural conversion.

tkbslc : good conversion but I think too much luminosity and lack of contrast.

Kolor-Pikker : nice conversion but I think there is not enough details in the highlights.

tzalman : very nice colorfull conversion but the water in the bottom right corner has a little the aspect of oil (may decrease the sharpness there ?).

chris_holtmeier : very nice conversion. I think this is my favourite one, even though I did hesitate a lot between this one and the one of tzalman.

So chris_holtmeier you win this one. Congratulations !
It's your turn for 454.

Agreed. Nice job, Chris.