The Royal Stables

The Royal Stables

Right behind the Govermental building Christiansborg lies the Royal Stables. The Queen has got a set of white horses, which apparently are rare, if they have to be really white. The horses stays in the building in the left.

About the processing
This is a typically double tone mapped HDR. I created it from 5 exposures in Photomatix. The double tone mapping gives this much more painterly and surreal style, which works well for some images. The idea of the double tone mapping is that, you first do one HDR photo and tone map it, and the image that you get from that process, you tone map too. This is done by pressing the “Tone mapping” button once more. A side effect of the double tone mapping is, that you get a lot more noise (grain) into the image. You have to clean some of it up, but not all. The noise adds some of the grittyness to the image, which is part of the effect.

The second time you tone map, the colors go crazy, and you have to lower the saturation. The luminosity you also want to bring far down. Exactly how far depends on your photo. But this step is what creates the mood of your photo. Try some of the other sliders, and see how they affect your photo.

I brought the double tone mapped image into Photoshop and did a lot of clean up and some noise reduction here. I took the sky from one of the original shots and masked that in. If you are unsure of how to mask/blend layers in Photoshop, have a look at my tutorial on blending layers.

Sunrise in Trysil

Norway just is beautiful, both in the summer time and in the winter time. I caught this one last week next to the ski-resort in Trysil. It’s a 7 shot HDR and tone mapped in Photomatix and later post-processed in Photoshop.

I found this peaceful area just behind the Trysil Mountain Resort Park Inn hotel. I could walk on a path made by skis. If I went of the path, I sank to the knee.

About the composition

Finally after 4 days the clouds  cleared from the Sun and I got out take some photographs. In this one, I have got two major point of interest, one is the stone covered in snow and the other is the Sun. I have placed them approximately on one of the lines of the golden ration. Then I have used the shadows from the trees to create lead in lines. This is a neat trick that works well. And at last, I made sure that the left hand side of the snow takes up the same amount of space as the ski. That works well too.

Post-processing

The post processing is done as a tone mapped image in Photomatix, which I then took into Photoshop. I blended the layers, as I explain how to do in my HDR tutorial, and then I used a golden filter from Topaz Adjust. I had lost some of the golden light in the processing and reintroduced it. And the last things I did in Photoshop was to remove flares and a small rainbow looked too much like a flare. In Lightroom I increased the contrast a bit and the clarity to get more dynamic image.