Last Sunday the Lady Friend and I paid one more visit to the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park in Upper Michigan to see the fall colors, and the Presque Isle River in the western part of the park provided this view, rendered with high-dynamic-range imaging software into one of the autumn photos that warms my heart the most. Click on the photo for the full 10-megapixel version if you can stand the bandwidth.
>>rendered with high-dynamic-range imaging software
ReplyDeleteCan you be more specific about what you did, and how, to get this photo so bright and crisp? I can barely figure out the menu system on my Nikon ... Is there a simply way to do this?
High dynamic range software enables you to get the kind of photo you actually see with your eyes -- with detail in both the bright and the dark parts of the view that the camera can't see all at once. And you can also intensify the colors.
ReplyDeleteWhat you do is set your camera (a tripod helps) to take three to five pictures of the subject, each picture a stop faster than the next. I.e., you take a photo at f16, but starting at 1/500 second, then 1/250, 1/125, 1/60 and finally 1/30. In short, too dark to too light.
(Many SLR cameras allow you to do this in a quick burst, pressing the shutter button just once.)
I use inexpensive software called Photomatix Pro (from http://www.hdrsoft.com/) to meld these five pictures into one. The software allows quite a bit of tweaking of color intensity.
Then you can further manipulate the image in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements or iPhoto or whatever you use to spiff up your pix.
It is not difficult at all, nor is it expensive.