Mystery Photo #8 was taken at sunrise last Saturday, but how did I shoot it and process it to get this colorful artistic effect? Just leave a comment with your best guess before Monday and I will enter the winner into my Christmastime drawing for camera gear. You don’t need to tell me any camera settings. Just what tools did I use and my editing process, along with the location.
Good luck! See below for the answer…
Mystery Photo #8 – Caryn Esplin – Bracketed images + Photomatix + ACR Adjustment Brushes + Photoshop Sharpening
Several of you were quite close with your guesses, so I will put everyone who left a comment in my Christmas drawing! One thing no one mentioned is using adjustments brushes in ACR (Adobe Camera Raw). My clue was when I asked … “…how did I shoot it and process it to get this colorful artistic effect?” I enhanced the colorful artistic effect with adjustment brushes.. one of my favorite creative tools in ACR.
Here are my steps for this 5-minute workflow:
1. Just before sunrise, we arrived at Egin Lakes, Sand Dunes Recreation Area, near St. Anthony, Idaho.
2. I asked these two student photographers to hold very still while I took three bracketed images on a tripod.
3. Processed all three images in Photomatix and tonemapped it to color and detail. Saved it as a jpeg.
4. Opened the Photomatix-processed jpeg in Bridge, Hit Cmd R to open it in ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) from Bridge… where I used adjustment brushes to enhance the sky colors.
5. From ACR, I opened the image on up in Adobe Photoshop for sharpening and selective vignetting.
6. Ran an action that: flattens the layers, loads my signature brush to stamp my logo in black, adds some layer effects to make it transparent, and sizes it down for my blog… all in one sweet, one-second flutter.
NOTE: I should have taken 10 seconds longer and used the Photoshop spot healing brush to remove the spot of sensor dust in the top right area… Eric was sharp to catch that one! I actually have the Nikon D600 on order, but I took this with one of our school cameras.. the trusty Canon T3i with the versatile and surprisingly sharp Canon 18-135 lens. I like to shoot with that setup as often as I use my own Nikon on class photo excursions…so I can show students how well they work and keep sharp on the settings so I can help them.
Photomatix, without ACR Adjustment Brushes or Photoshop Sharpening
Original bracketed images taken with a tripod at Egin Lakes at sunrise.
Here is a list of people I have earned a spot in my Christmastime camera gear giveaway! I will draw names to determine the winners. You may get your named entered as many times as you make a correct guess on one of my weekly Friday Mystery Photos.
Names in my CHRISTMASTIME GEAR GIVEAWAY DRAWING… so far:
#1. Swan Lake: Rebecca Johnston, Blake Jackson
#2. Mormon Row Barn: Julie Peterson
#3. Roaring Camp Railroad: Chelsea Beckstead
#4. Fruit Light Painting: Danny Morgan
#5. Jellyfish: AJ Buruca, Lisa K, Armin Kraemer, Danny Morgan
#6. Caramel Pretzel Logs: AJ Buruca
#7. IF Fountain: Danny Morgan
#8. Egin Lakes: Amiee Mecham, AJ Buruca, Eric Chen, Jay ?, Danny Morgan
Hi Sister Esplin! My guess is Swan Lake and that you merged three different exposures of this same scene to create an HDR image.
Thanks for the comment, Aimee! It is great to hear from you and that was a very good guess. I will leave a comment here Monday with the answer, as well as a paragraph in the blog post too. Have a great weekend!
I am going to guess Egin Lake near the St Anthony sand dunes. And like Aimee said I think it’s a bracketed photo of three exposures and possibly edited with Photomatix.
This is HDR but you didn’t use bracket exposure. The softwares you used are ACR and Photoshop. Besides adjusting color, you also adjusted sharpness, it’s sharper than you would get from RAW.
You used hyperfocal distance that’s why there’s a dot on the upper-right cornor of your picture: a sign of Nikon D7000 (unless you have a D800/800E) if you don’t clean your sensor very often.
I’m guessing you use a 35 f/1.8 DX lens (unless you have the almighty 35 f/1.4G), or the similar focal lenth if you used a zoom, with no or only UV filter.
The location was either Swan Lake or somewhere up by Ririe/Thornton area by one of those rivers.
I’m a history major and only talked to you once so I don’t really know what gears you have…
my guess is that you took this a Egin Lakes up near the sand dunes. I am pretty confident that you took this into Photomatix Pro Plus with about 3 different exposures, being -2, 0, +2 to make this final HDR Product. Were your camera setting something like f/22 and 1/6 with your tripod?
I love how this one turned out. The colors are just amazing.
I’m guessing that you took this picture at Egin Lakes. You took 3 different images with 3 different exposures, -2, 0, and +2. After you took the images, you put it into Photomatix Pro and merged them together to form this HDR image. I also think that you edited it by increasing the sharpness, and adjusting the color as well. It also looks like you added a little bit of a vignette to it, making the edges darker so the color could stand out more. Oakley also looks a little brighter, so I think that you lightened her up a little too.
Thank you all for participating! I have some great news…I just posted the winners and the answers with some original images in this post… at the bottom.