LightningPaul

Last summer I walked in an industrial area because I love seeing such big strange but very fascinating machines. I have no idea what its purpose is but I assume it doing something with waste processing. Perhaps they burn trash. I can't tell where this one was shot because I got busted by security guards.


TECH-INFO: I want to show that using HDR techniques you can make better and more realistic images than without. This pretty resembles what I saw. It shows the same beauty, the same wow effect and the same toning and contrasts as I experienced while looking with my eyes.

The dynamic range of light was very high. One RAW file would not be capable of holding so much detail of the sky and the black box with dust which is in the middle bottom of the image. So here, using a tripod, I shot seven JPGs with a stop difference. First I processed them in DxO Optics to correct lens distortions and softness.

Using Photomatrix I had two options of processing all the exposures: making a HDR file and tone map it, or using exposure blending. The first produces very striking results but they are balancing between hyper realistic and artistic looking. The outcome of the second method looks very natural but rather dull without any wow factor. I used both methods to create two images (in TIFF format): a tone mapped version and an exposure blended version. In Photoshop I blended those two results together resulting in a natural looking image with a slight wow effect (or at least I hope). Please let me know what you think.

Further in Photoshop I slightly enhanced the contrast using curves and made the blue color of the sky a bit darker with the selective color tool. Finally I added some vignetting and did some skewing because the horizontal lines were not fully straight.

I also posted the totally unaltered middle exposed JPG here. Have fun comparing them.