Take the following shots for example. These are from a recent engagement session.
Before:
After:
Before:
After:
So a couple of weeks ago I spent the day at a Photoshop seminar that was super fun for me. The instructor was Ben Willmore. Who is an extremely talented and interesting instructor to listen to. His techniques often get the same results I'm getting, but he goes about them another way, so it's nice to have another technique to apply and play with.
The part of the seminar I was most looking forward to was learning High Dynamic Range Imaging. If you click on Ben's name above it will take you to one of his websites where he has several HDR images. The program he used was Photomatix. I've downloaded a trial version and think I will be purchasing the full version next week. So my samples here today have their watermark on the image.
Here are two of my tries on HDR imaging. The first is my work station, the second is a fire my husband had going one day. Both were made with 3 bracketed images, one dark, one medium and one light(I set my camera to bracket shooting at 2 stops and shot on Aperture Priority). With the right settings in Photomatix an image can be made to look very similar to an illustration.
Something interesting to note is that the DVD case that can be seen in the upper right hand window was actually far back in the armoir, but because of the bracketing it can be seen very easily as if it were forward near the window.
My friend Gina will be in town this next week and we plan to play for a while with some new techniques I'm working on with lighting, so I hope to have some more images to play with!
