P#18: A Picture Perfect Moment in a Sage Field

A Photomatix Secret

Tony Sweet: This is a picture of a sage field. One of the things I like to do with HDR is just hit "default" when you get the image in Photomatix. When you process an image with Photomatix the software will automatically configure the settings to the settings of the photo you worked on previously, so you want to hit default to cancel out those previous settings.

Audri Lanford: Oh, that's good to know. That's something you really want to watch out for.

Tony Sweet: Right. You want to go in and just hit default, unless you like the way the photo looks with those settings.

Hit default immediately. When you do that Photomatix will provide settings for what it thinks the picture should look like. A lot of times, I'll just keep that setting. Then I'll take it into Photoshop and bring out -- like I did in this case. (click the image for a larger version)

A Touch of Photoshop

With this sage field picture I brought out the green of the sage, then brought out the gold in that little gold grass in the front, darkened the blue sky a little bit, and also maybe a mountain which is a little bit redder.

You really can't do those kinds of specific targeted adjustments in Photomatix. It's mostly global. You can touch on little stuff in Photomatix, but in general, these very targeted adjustments (like the gold and the sage) are all done with Viveza.

You can do it in Photoshop layers too. More times than not, you have to take the image from Photomatix, save it as a tiff, and bring it back into Photoshop almost immediately. Then do your targeted adjustments. That's kind of the basic workflow that most of us ascribe to.

In Conclusion

In HDR photography, software is everything. You need to know which products to use, and how to use them. Tony Sweet used not one, but two software programs for this shot. He first used Photomatix's default setting to create the HDR image, and then touched the image up in Photoshop to get this amazing sage field picture.