Taken from a single raw. In Lightroom I made 3 exposures- one basic, one overexposed by +2 to bring out the detail in the foreground and the guy, and another set at -4 to attempt to contain the massive blow out in the sky (it didn't work). I exported all 3 into PS and masked in/out the applicable areas to make the image more like what my eyes saw. The image was then flattened to make a single image to work on. Horizon was tilted too as this was taken from the hip.
I suppose in that way it IS an HDR image but only in the literal sense- there was no Photomatix involved.
When I had the file in PS I shifted the colours to warmer hues with color balance and selective colouring. The tone-mapped look was done by 3 applications of Nik Color Efex's Tonal Contrast filter (it's awesome) at different settings. The glow was acheived by using the diffuse glow filter and gaussian blur at different blending modes (most were done on screen or lighten and then masked for specific parts, namely the guy's back, the sky and the reflections in the water).
Dodge/burn on the guy to add dimension to him and some d/b on the water too to provide more depth to it and a bit more of a 3d look.
I pushed the saturation a lot for this one to make it look a bit more surreal. The final touches consisted of using Noiseninja to soften some of the tonal contrast filter's detrimental effects (uber noise/grain in clear areas) and a run of USM on the usual settings of 15/25. I added a tiny border by making a new layer, adding a 6 pixel stroke and blurring it on about 25 pix with gaussian blur.
And lastly, I did a dust & scratches thing after the resize on the guy's torso and left arm at radius 1 and threshold 8 just to smooth out the shadow areas and make it look less noisy and rough. His skin almost looked like it was made of sand which looked cool but incongruous.
I expect this to totally bomb on DPC, but then again, I'm through caring what the scores are on this website. I don't expect another image to be in this challenge that even looks like this and for me, it's quite a departure in terms of style and post-processing so whatever, I learned something whilst doing this...having said that, I expect this to get a 5.6 like all the pics I like do, if this gets over a 6 i'll be surprised- I further expect to have a 7+ score from commentors.
Cheers.
Statistics
Place: 87 out of 436 Avg (all users): 6.0784 Avg (commenters): 7.6000 Avg (participants): 5.8774 Avg (non-participants): 6.5319 Views since voting: 1070 Views during voting: 275 Votes: 153 Comments: 13 Favorites: 1 (view)
You know what, I actively dislike (perhaps not strong enough a word) the processing here. The more so, I think, because its actually quite a strong image, with a great sense of composition and timing, and confidence in breaking the 'rules'. The ruin of a fine photo.
I find it tough to rate shots like this. I like the composition, and the texture in the photo, but find that when I look at the shot, it looks like it has been over processed, and therefore loses its photographic quality, and begins to look like digital art instead. 6 from me.
Add photograph to your favorites
Add photographer to your favorites
Photographer found comment helpful.
