Old Mill House
Walking around Murray's Mill, checking out one of the old houses. This will be a breakdown of my process from beginning to end.
I started with the tripod setup and the camera set to do a (3) shot HDR. Normal / 2 stops down / 2 stops up.
Here are those (3) shots.
Orig PhotoOOC (Out of camera) shot
Original Shot
HDR-Light2 Step Lighter Exposure for HDR
Light Shot - (2) Stops UP
HDR-DARK2 Step Darker Exposure for HDR
Dark Shot (2) Stops Down.
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These are merged together in a program called Photomatix, the result is an image with more uniform brightness and shadows. Allowing you to see more details in the image.
HDR Merged(3) Shot HDR Merged Shot
After HDRHDR with some lightroom adjustments
AFTER HDR Import back into Lightroom, with a little LR adjustments for color (or less), some brightness, contrast, etc.
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Wanted a different look for this, more like an old painting, or charcoal look. Took it into Topaz Impression, with Charcoal III preset, made some tweaks to the defaults.
You can see on the right some other preset options you can choose from.
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Once back into Lightroom, I decided i wanted the trees to be a little darker, so I used LR's Adjustment brush to "paint" a darker shadow and exposure onto the trees (the green shows what i painted).
LightRoom - Adjustment BrushUsing the Adjustment Brush to darken the trees
Once this was done, wanted to put a little more emphasis on the outlines of the trees and house. Took it into PS and duplicated the Layer called it Sketch. Took this into Topaz Glow, and selected a Sketch Preset, tweaked that some. Brought this back into Lightroom (turned off the main photo so you can see just the "sketch" layer). Dropped the opacity of this layer to about 40%, merged them back to lightroom.
Topaz Glow SketchUsed this as an overlay to darken the edges on the house and trees
Once this was back in lightroom, I made a few more adjustments to light, shadow, etc. To end up here:
Final Mill House ImageAfter all the edits
This whole process took me about 20-30 mins. But I like the final image look.
What do you think? Questions on the steps? Do you like this kind of post? I'm still learning here what to post, and how.
Thanks!
David
