New China

vipgraphx

No longer a newbie, moving up!
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Some Where In the Desert
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New China Restaurant. Took this the other day in the morning. I like building and the use of the evergreen trees. Keep in mind this is in Tucson so its nice to see live trees rather than dead shrubs.....or mesquite and paloverde trees.


new china by VIPGraphX, on Flickr
 
Very interesting shot, nice vivid colors, but...
...The trees on the right are blurry and create a mess with the clouds.
...the restaurant sign is dark.
...parts of the photo look "dirty".
 
Why HDR for this particular photo?

In the Morning time there was a great deal of shadow fall off on the front side of the building. Also without no excuse and the truth is, I like to use HDR and tonemap many of my shots.


As far as the sign it was a really dark red almost Maroon. The sky does look dirty in the upper right corner along with the building by the sign.
Could use some masking with one of the other exposures to fix it.

Here is an edit with suggestions taken into consideration. Created a layer and adjust red for the sign and masked it in. I then flattened the image and used the dodge and burn tools to help out the dirty areas. I flattened and then duplicated layer and cloned in some clouds between the tree where is was blown out.


new china by VIPGraphX, on Flickr

Cheers!
 
Last edited:
The second one is better, but I still think the sign area is unnaturally dark.

When I just got Photomatix Pro, I went crazy with HDR and tone mapping, especially tone mapping. So much so that I stopped editing the RAW but just throw it into Photomatix and see what it gives me. So much so that when I am taking a shot in conditions where I know parts of the photo will be too dark, I didn't care because I was going to try my luck with Photomatix anyways. Well, soon I realized that it became boring and meaningless and all of my photos look the same. So I stopped relying on Photomatix, but look at each photo I take and do appropriate editing, whether it's RAW editor, tone mapping etc.

When I use tone mapping or any form of editing, whatever the goal is, the underlying rule for myself is, it has to look natural..... or rather, the fact that it's tone mapped or HDR should not be the first thing on the audience's mind.
Just my 2 cents.
 

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