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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BackdoorArts" data-source="post: 334419" data-attributes="member: 9240">@<a href="http://nikonites.com/member.php?u=13196" target="_blank">hark</a>, the thing that these have in common with a lot of HDR photography is the emphasis on texture and structure.  High Dynamic Range, in and of itself, isn't really about that, it's about the maximizing of visible light so that you see everything that's there (something your brain does automatically even in harsh lighting conditions) but is not capture-able in that form by a single, "normal" exposure of the camera sensor.  What happens, a lot of times, is that when you flatten the light you lose the shadows that help your eye define the boundaries between things, or even within things.  To compensate many programs, and photographers, will apply extra "structure" to make these boundaries more visible.  This because a defacto style of HDR early on, and these surreal aspects made many people want to try it, but they are not something that is inherent to HDR photography, they're just a technique that many HDR photographers chose to apply.  While my photos are not HDR (mainly because the conditions do not require it), the B&W luminosity layer I use is often purposefully set so that it flattens the differences in color luminance, so it has a very similar impact.  For example, let's take a closer look at this photo...[ATTACH]102297[/ATTACH]I've chosen this because it's predominantly composed of blues, reds/browns and shades of grey.  Here's the original photo...[ATTACH]102300[/ATTACH]There are at least 6 distinct shades of blue within the shot, ranging from very light and pale to deep and dark.  When I created the black & white luminance mask, I purposefully looked to use a blue filter so that it would effectively render the blues "invisible" to some level in the B&W shot.  As you can see in this screen shot from Silver Efex Pro 2, I have the color filter set on a shade of blue, which comes as close as you can get to squeezing them into the same level on luminance/lightness...[ATTACH]102308[/ATTACH]When this is applied as a Luminance mask, it takes the darker blues from the original shot and lightens them up - that's what the Luminosity blend mode does.  Now, if I had done the opposite, a literal 180 degree shift on the color wheel, the filter would instead render the blues almost a inky black...[ATTACH]102310[/ATTACH]Applying this as a luminance blend and you can see that the blues have now all shifted to a darker state, some obviously more than others...[ATTACH]102319[/ATTACH]In both final shots, the texturing has remained consistent - a product of boosting the clarity in Lightroom both before and after processing the shot in Photoshop, and from the use of high levels of Structure in Silver Efex Pro 2.  However, in the second case, the deepening of the colors give you less of an idea that HDR photography might have been used.  Balancing this kind of luminance shift is far more difficult when you have a full spectrum of colors, and it can require the use of layer masks to reduce the impact the filtering of one color has on another (i.e. when I filtered blues, all the yellows go deep brown, which meant the sunflowers have no yellow as in the top photo from the last set - a correction I missed).  So, I'll mask out the luminosity layer to keep reds from becoming deep crimson and yellows too brown where I don't want them.  I'm anxious to throw myself into the luminosity masks that MoabMan mentioned yesterday, but that's going to require some time and study.  Those masks are built based on true luminance, where what I'm doing here is building a false layer, further adding to the surreal nature of the shots.</blockquote>

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