Day 236

Rusty Diamonds


I tried making a bunch of HDRs from this series using Photomatix to process them, but none really turned out too well. I got the software after seeing this guy's site. He's a local amateur photographer from nearby Longmont that works with computers (perhaps at CU from what I can gather) here in Boulder. He's got a ton of pictures of the office building he works in, and I still can't figure out where the hell it is. Anyway, a good 90% of his most recent photos are HRDs processed using Photomatix. I figured I'd give it a shot, and my first attempt turned out okayish. I'm still not very well learned in how to use the program, so I couldn't get today's HDRs to look the way I wanted them to.

Just for fun, I then tried to open a single RAW file using Photomatix to see what it could do with it. Right off the bat, the tone map it automatically generated was more dynamic than anything I could subsequently get Photoshop to produce. I made little tweaks to it in Photomatix before sending it over to Photoshop to add a little more shadow depth and a slight vignette. I was so pleased with the result that I decided to do all of today's photos the same way so as to learn the program a little better. The picture of the day was processed solely using Photoshop, though, because it already had such good colors and contrast already, and Photomatix exagerated those so much that it turned the photo into clown piss.