HDR Project: Alabama Hills
- Tone Mapping the Image
- Post-Processing in Photoshop
- It's Your Turn: The China Grill
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
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A couple of years ago, I spoke at a couple of workshops based in the eastern Sierra Nevadas (California) for famed wildlife photographer Moose Peterson. Driving up and down the Sierras would come to be one of my most treasured memories. That said, when you are making landscape images there is no bigger wrench that can be thrown into your plans than the weather.
We initially set out to visit the Alabama Hills—a great rocky area just south of Mammoth, CA. As we were driving to the area, I noticed that the clouds started increasing. More and more clouds appeared the further we drove into the Alabama Hills. By the time we got to the location, clouds covered 85 percent of the area. To everyone there, the shoot was a bust.
Now, it’s completely okay for you to spend a lot of time getting to a location for a shoot, be skunked out of the shoot due to weather, and just head back home. Most photographers, however, will stick around for a little while and see if there are any breaks in the weather that offer pockets from which to shoot. The overcast gray skies didn’t really provide for much, but man did we try.
I’ve always hedged my bets when I am out shooting at a location by bracketing shots. This is something that I did prior to HDR—you just never know when you need something a little more underexposed (or overexposed). So, I shot brackets of the area and headed back to the camp.
Much later, I would come back to those brackets and think, “You know, by themselves the pictures don’t really do much, but what if I used all of them in HDR?” The results really surprised me.
Tone Mapping the Image
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The default setting needed a little bit of work, so I moved my Strength and Detail Contrast settings to their maximum values. Once they were set, I added some Color Saturation to taste—my taste usually borders a little bit on the oversaturated side here, but I’ll tone it down a little later. With that set, I dragged the Lighting Adjustments slider to the right and then increased the Tone Compression, and you can see the clouds and mountains start popping in.
The clouds are a little dark here and I don’t have enough contrast in the mountains. So, to counteract that, I’ll drag the Gamma slider to the left (giving me contrast), and increase the White Point (helping the clouds). While it’s not exactly what I would want in the clouds, I know I can fix them a little bit better in Photoshop.