There are plenty of occasions when I simply don’t have the tripod, or perhaps even the time, to set up the perfect HDR. I have had this image on my hard drive since August, and I hadn’t yet uncovered the techniques that would transform the raw file into a better reflection of what the scene had ‘recorded’ in my memory.

Here’s the “after” [by "after" I mean after the image has been recorded on the sensor. In my lexicon, "before" is what I saw and persists in my imagination, i.e. like the image above].

There are several issues we will address one at a time.

First, the shadows on the porch. This porch has a fantastic compass rose painted on the surface, and one of those sky-blue ceilings (to keep the bees away, I’m told). As captured by the sensor, the compass rose looks like a weather-worn indoor outdoor remnant from railroad salvage, and the ceiling is just too muddy. I also find that wood features like shingles, the decking, and the white fence love the effect of the LucisArt or Topaz Adjust filters.

In this case I worked with Topaz Adjust. But first I had to isolate the sea, bluffs, sky and clouds from the hotel structure, so I turned to the Polygonal Lasso Tool in Photoshop, and created this selection, which I hastened to save as a channel. I won’t go into details (experiment! try! err!), but the Refine Edge dialog is essential, and is an option introduced in CS3 and available when any selection tool is active.

I tweeked the “Adaptive Exposure” slider, and its “Regions” slider to .4, and 14 for this project. I also boosted the “Highlight” slider to .06 in order to protect that beautiful railing.

The “Details” settings were: “Strength” 1.8; “Boost” 1.1. This enhances local contrast, giving the wood surfaces the texture that I think of when remembering New England cottage style buildings.

I “stamped” the layers to consolidate the work so far: (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E).

Second fix is the sea, sky, clouds, and bluffs in the distance. In the original RAW file, they simply lack the saturation and richness I remember from the moment I pressed the shutter release.

This one was an easy fix — and I’ve used this loads of times since I first experimented with it. I grabbed my selection (highlighted it on the channels panel, clicked on “load channel as selection”, then went to my new top “stamped” layer, and clicked on the “Create Mask” icon in the layers panel. This creates a mask and applies the current selection — the area outside that selection is masked “out,” the selection area is now available for adjustment.

After experimenting, I found that simply applying the “multiply” blend mode did the trick. It restored the vibrance I remembered without introducing the extreme pixel damage of heavy saturation adjustments.

Final tweek: adjust that horizon line to make the final composition look just right.

So: If you have an extra $6,000,000, this is a great real estate opportunity! If not, you can see why Block Island is one of my favorite places by checking out the BI sets on my Flickr photostream.