The other day at work some of the guys in my team asked me about image processing, so I promised to bring in my computer and show them what I do.  So after three days of forgetting I finally remembered to take in my computer and today we looked at the apps I use.

At one point one of them asked about HDR images and asked how you create them and why bother.  So I went looking for an example to show them what you can do.  After searching for a couple of minutes I found this anker picture that I took on Saturday morning on Alki just after the sun had come up.  I bracket pictures quite a lot and had three images of the anker with different exposures.  So I dropped them into Photomatix and tonemapped the result.

Then I post processed the image in Photoshop, removing some dust spots and blurry seagulls. Next I tidied up grass a little, got rid of some purple fringing and selected a bush that wasn’t moving about from one of the master images to replace the blurry one I had in the tonemapped image.  The picture had an unsightly public sign in it so I covered that up with some long grass, and finally I lightened the sky, HDR tends to give you black clouds and while the sky did look dramatic, there were no black clouds.

Once I’d done all that I applied a couple of Nik Software filters, one to apply a sunrise effect, the other to add a vignette.  Having completed the work we compared the original normal exposure image and the one I’d post processed.  The funny thing was I really liked the finished image and this wasn’t one I was planning on posting.  So this is kind of a free-be.

So that’s the image I’m posting tonight.

Now of course the guy I showed all this to is planning on buying a load of software – his wife is going to kill me!

Abi had a great gymnastics meet yesterday and got 5 medals – 3 of them were 1st place (one was best overall) – so the guys tried them on.