Things to do at the gallery when you’re bored

So, it’s been a slow couple of weeks. You know, “teeth pullin’ slow.” Yeah, so at times like these you’ve got to do something with yourself…….

What to do, what to do?

Ah, how about toying a little more with my CS5 demo version?  Okay, I’ll do it!

I’ve seen some really cool composite images out there, and honestly I’ve always wanted to try one, but never got around to really giving it a whirl.  Today I sat down and picked two images that I’ve shot in the past few weeks, tossed them into Photoshop CS5, mixed them around with a splash of Topaz Adjust 4, and came up with something that doesn’t totally stink on ice.  Well, at least I don’t think it’s horrible or something…….

So, here’s where I started

Ah that’s a cool image.  The diner over in Bagdad.  What a cool spot!  I decided what I’d do here is run the single image through the single image HDR tool in Photoshop CS5 to see what I got.  After tooling around with it for a while I wasn’t quite happy all the way, but went with what I had rendered and took it a little further.  What did I do?

First I copied the HDR like image into two separate layers.  The middle layer was run through Topaz Adjust, and I used the “Charcoal” setting.  Once that was done I blended the colored layer above it, dropped the opacity, and had the dark looking diner scene.  Oh, I also cloned out the weird gravel and made it look like the parking lot extended right to the diner.

Once all that was done I took a look at my next image……

I shot this one the other week at the off road race on Whiskey Row.  Lorin had his whole “into the music” thing going on and it worked.  I pulled this image into Photoshop, created a mask, and grabbed only Lorin’s image.  That then got dragged into the recently edited diner shot.

Now, Lorin totally didn’t match with the scene in Bagdad.  Way too much color, not grungy enough, etc.  So first, I selected his layer and did a Hue/Saturation adjustment.  I dropped the saturation considerably.  Next, I combined the Lorin Layer with the Background (the diner) and ran it through Topaz Adjust quickly.  “Dramatic Portrait” setting, and I masked it so only Lorin received the effect, the diner did not.

And the final result?

I’ve still got a little more learning to do, and practice on masking techniques and blending disparate images, but I thought, hey, this was a fun experiment.

Oh, by the way, for those wondering…….  I still prefer Photomatix over the new Adobe HDR tool.  Doesn’t mean you can’t do cool things with the new tool, just means I have a great degree of comfort with what I do with Photomatix.  But with this experiment I think you’ll agree, you can produce a pretty convincing HDR like image on CS5.