Autumn Reflections (HDR)

The story of this photo

I took this shot at a little lake while I was on a walk. I don’t really like to see the summer leaving. But I have to say that autumn does have its nice aspects. Above all, of course, those fantastic colors. On a sunny day it’s wonderful!

How it was shot

• Taken handheld [details]
• Three exposures (0, -2, +2 ev) autobracketed and merged to get and HDR
• Camera: Nikon D90
• Lens: Sigma 10-20mm F3,5 EX DC HSM
• Details can be found here

How it was tonemapped

• Preparation: developed the raw files with ACR mainly in order to reduce the CA [details]
• HDR creation and tonemapping using Photomatix version 3.1 (Detail Enhancer)
• Saved as 16bit TIF

How it was post-processed

• Post-processing was done in Photoshop
• Topaz Adjust on the entire image to get back the colors and the details [details]
• Topaz Denoise [details]
• Saturation layer on the sky (master and blues)
• Levels layer on the sky (contrast and brightening)
• Saturation layer on the clouds (slight desaturation)
• Levels layer on the clouds (increased contrast)
• Levels layer on the sky to even out uneven luminance resulting from the tonemapping (used red channel luminance as the mask) [details]
• Saturation layer on the water (master)
• Selective color layer on the water (more blacks in the blues)
• Levels layer on the water (more contrast)
• Levels layer on the construction (brightening)
• Saturation layer on the construction (slight desaturation)
• Saturation layer on the trees (yellows, reds, master)
• Levels layer on the trees (more contrast)
• Some retouch on the water to remove leafs
• Vignette effect on the lower half of the photo using a masked fill layer [details]
• Sharpening using the high-pass filter [details]

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