At the start of year, after a couple of months of not going out on my bike due to cold weather I decided I should start again. Unfortunately though, now that I have a camera I find it hard to actually get any amount of cycling done as I’m constantly stopping to take pictures of things. In this instance I got almost as far as the next village before deciding to get a few shots of this tree.
The tree actually looked like this…
The brown and green at the base of the tree were why I stopped originally – but the image just left me a bit cold, for obvious reasons really as whilst the tree looked interesting there is nothing special about the composition.
So I set to work, trying to make the most of the interesting clouds and the slightly nightmarish tree.
The actual effect was achieved in Photomatix by increasing the highlight saturation and decreasing the shadow saturation. A more detailed description of this process, along with source files to try it yourself can be found here
http://www.andystafford.co.uk/winter-tree-and-photomatix/
Visit http://www.hdrsoftwaretutorial.co.uk/ for tutorials and a discount code which will give you 15% off the purchase of Photomatix.
