While on the HDR workshop with Trey Ratcliff in Austin, TX, in mid-January, we did a [cold] photowalk the first night. This image is a 5-image RAW HDR. First, tonemapped in Photomatix, then the rest of the processing was done in Photoshop. I used Topaz Adjust 4 to help mask in the brick details. First time I had done a night shot and with neon signs. Pretty fun, but a bit challenging to make it look right. Comments?

Ok, so I’m behind in posting. It’s been an incredibly busy couple of months. I needed a break from work stuff, so thought I’d process a couple images from my HDR (high dynamic range) workshop with Trey Ratcliff in Austin, TX in early January 2010. The workshop was held in the amazing Driskill Hotel. The weather was surprisingly cold, but had a great time regardless. I met some excellent photographers at the workshop and provided both inspiration and the realization for just how early in my photography journey I am. One of the participants came all the way from Norway for the workshop, which sold out in 10 minutes!

I’ll post a series of four images, all taken with my Nikon D300, using various lenses. All images started by being brought into Adobe Lightroom, then tonemapped in Photomatix, and finally the processing was completed in Adobe Photoshop. The first image below was taken from 7 RAW files using multiple exposures of a grand piano in the lobby bar of the Driskill Hotel. The exposure was pretty difficult due to the high variation of light from the bottom to the top of the image. There was a fair amount of Photoshop work to clean it up too.

The next image below was also in the Driskill Bar (hey, don’t get the wrong idea that I was spending a lot of time there), which is a stunning place. It was taken from 5 images. Interestingly enough, a couple of the images had people walking through the lobby. Given the long exposure they looked like a ghost trail, which was pretty easily removed in Photoshop. By the way, the tif file of this is about 60MB, so be glad this was in around 80K.

The Driskill is truly a beautiful place and a happy reminder of the elegance not found in hotels today. The HDR image below shows the magnificent lobby, again using 5 RAW images. The tile details were made more visible using the Topaz Adjust filter in Photoshop. No other part of the image used the Topaz filters.

The final image below for tonight is also in from the Driskill Hotel lobby, just a different spot and angle.

I think these are a bit better than my previous HDR attempts as they look more realistic. What do you think?