Light My Path: How-To
Here’s how to take a poor quality photo and make it into something memorable that accurately depicts your original vision of the scene.
Problems with this image are numerous, the most glaring being the white balance, soft focus and lack of detail in too-dark shadows. Fortunately it was a Camera RAW file and there were no large areas of blown out highlights so I thought it might be a good candidate for my first experiment in improving an inferior shot with HDR and tone mapping. This is the original RAW image as it came out of the camera:
Step 1
I dragged the file’s icon into Photoshop, which opened the camera RAW conversion dialog. I adjusted the white balance, manually dragging the slider towards the cooler range of hues to get rid of the overwhelming yellow color cast. I then opened a COPY of the file. I repeated the process again with the same original raw file–removing the color cast with the same settings as the previous file, but this time, I also adjusted the exposure levels by raising them about 2 stops. Opened a copy of THIS file, which was automatically opened with a suffix of −2. I repeated the process twice more–one shot opened with exposure altered by lowering about 2 stops, and the other with some slight lightening of the shadow areas while still in the raw state. This gave me 4 copies of this photo, each at a different exposure level.
Steps 2-3
I saved all 4 exposures, opened them in Photomatrix and created an HDR file, which was then saved before any further alterations. Next I tone mapped the HDR image by adjusting the controls in the tone mapping Detail Enhancer tab. This is my result:
I can’t complain about the detail, but to me it just looks flat and uninteresting. Why I added some sharpening to this I can’t say, as it just made the foreground too light and the scene lost even more depth. Nor did it have that dreamy feel I had experienced when I first came upon this scene.
Step 4
I reopened and saved the original raw file with the color cast corrected. Then duplicated the layer and brought out some detail in the shadows by adjusting levels and curves. This made the rest of the picture too light so I erased the top portion of the lighter layer so that the only real change I saw was in the lighter foreground. Then I merged the adjusted layers into one. Without Photomatrix’s tone mapping, my beam of sunlight through the trees was preserved.
Steps 5–Orton Effect
I took the composite file I just created and applied the Orton effect. I duplicated the background layer and changed the Blend Mode to Screen and named the layer ‘Sharp.’ Then created another background copy just under it before I merged it down to the new background layer I just created. Next I created another background layer and named it Blur. I applied a Gaussian Blur at a strength of about 20 and changed the Blend Mode to Multiply.
This gave me the dream-like effect I’d been looking for, but I still wanted more contrast and color saturation, so I trashed the 2 layers I’d just created and started over. I made a copy of the background layer and changed the Blend Mode to Overlay, then lowered the opacity until I got the saturation and contrast I wanted. Then I merged this layer down to the last background layer I had created, then repeated the above process with this newer layer.
Finishing Touches
Much closer to what I felt I was looking for, I still felt the foreground was too saturated and the tree trunk in the foreground too dark. I selected the tree trunk from one of my earlier tone mapped files, pasted it over the existing tree trunk and did some selective erasing back to the layer beneath until I got the detail I wanted. I also did some erasing on the layer beneath on the background scenery to give a little more contrast between the foreground tree trunk and the background. And now…I’m now happy! THIS is what I saw (and EXPERIENCED) when I first saw this scene…
