Julie doing Vermeer in Gruyere, originally uploaded by TimDD.

I know we go for the natural side light and the unnatural twisted neck typical of Vermeer ALL THE TIME, but I never tire of it. My Julie once again, this time amongst the painted wood panels of Gruyere castle on a cloudy, natural soft-box afternoon.

Cold-Glory, originally uploaded by TimDD.

A good friend and former colleague recommended that I submit this photo to a boston.com photo contest. The theme is “Cold,” and the voting is open this week. Please help me win! Here’s the link: you vote for three of your favorites, out of 50 finalists.

Vote now!

Totally Cool On Black
The recent storm left these smooth and cool undulations on the snow in our back yard. So as the sun set, the shadows became deeper and deeper blue. This got a kitchen sink full of processing:
1) seven frame HDR to start
2) photomatix with white point, black point, luminosity jacked pretty high
3) one original exposure blended to restore sense to the sky
4) Topaz Adjust to trick out the moguls
5) Surface blur to mellow out the distraction of the tree line at the edge of the property
6) slight (yes… slight) saturation boost to reds and yellows to make that sun just weep with sadness as it leaves this beautiful setting.

As for the Kinkade reference: my landscaper’s wife commented on some processed photos I made for his sight: “These look like a Thomas Kinkade painting.” I’m just listening to my customers…

Rachel at 35, originally uploaded by TimDD.

We celebrated with Rachel and her mother on Rachel’s 35th. This was a simple on-camera flash shot, bounced off the ceiling; significant surface blur and a good half-hour of brushing to bring the key details back. We’re going to gallery-wrap this one for Rachel’s mother, Susan.

First observations: A great expression, but lack of dramatic punch — and several distractions in the background. Oh and there’s that nagging eyelash over the subject’s left eye. So I got out the clone stamp tool to remove the eyelash — no problem. I wanted to get rid of that pink area over the subject’s shoulder — so I matched the color of the surrounding background as the foreground color. I used the magic wand to select the pink area — then the “refine edge” capability to improve the selection. I picked up a soft-edge brush and started painting at low opacity — 20% — and increased until I was comfortable the area would match.

I also wanted to remove the upper right area reflection — and it started out pretty ugly. Here’s an interim version:

I continued to work on that area until it was properly brushed into irrelevance. It takes some experimenting to get it just right.

Next I went to the channels palette and selected the “blue” channel — it has nice contrast and detail in the beard and skin. I copied that channel, than returned to the layers palette and pasted that selection into a new layer. I changed the blend mode to “overlay,” and then applied the Sharpen / Unsharp Mask filter. Here’s the result, after selecting the “Soft Light” blend mode:

A bit stronger than I am looking for — so I pulled out the “Lorton” trick: take a copy of the original layer, place it on top of the layer stack, apply a heavy Gaussian blur, and apply the “multiply” blend mode. Add a curves adjustment layer (but don’t make any adjustment), apply the “Screen” blend mode. Adjust the opacity of each of these layers to your liking — I also added a “Hue / Saturation” adjustment layer to address the ‘cumulative saturation’ phenomenon of the activities so far.

Again: the final:

What a fine morning walk we had with the new Gitzo tripod. This final image is the result of four vertical five-frame exposures, stitched together in photoshop. Cropped. A channel selection used to create a mask, and a couple of blending layers used to, well, undo some of the magic that Photomatix sometimes gets carried away with. Topaz helped provide some nice crunchy detail to the tree line, and a nice gradient vignetted the foreground.  Orig post on flickr.

This pic, a bit of a cliche to be sure, is the result of several key processing enhancements.

First, it’s five frames blended and tone-mapped using Photomatix Pro.  When I brought the TIFF into camera raw, I was amazed by the register accuracy.  So just the same I went and made some detail / sharpness adjustments in camera raw.

In Photoshop, it required a crop from the original.  I used Topaz — quirky given the memory constraints but still a fine tool — to bring up local contrast to create the texture, and to boost some of the saturation.

I used a mask to reduce some of the overzealous pixel effects, especially on the water.

Surface blur enabled me to remove some of the distracting detail in the surrounding trees.  I really wanted to keep attention on the rocks and water.

Finally, an elliptical selection, quick mask, gaussian blur and fill with black: to produce a bit of vignette around those same tree detail areas.

Enjoy!

Tags: Alps, Alpine stream, synopshots, Switzerland, Suisse, Schweitz

Cathedral of St. Peter, Geneva, Switzerland, originally uploaded by TimDD.

Updated with Giorgos~ generously shared technique for creating that awesomely professional looking drop shadow.

This photo has now become "the most interesting" photo on Flickr when you seach for "Kobe Bryant."  Amazing.  Volume up especially as Kobe recently reached the 20,000 point milestone (before age 30). I heard on SportsCenter this morning that Wilt reached this point in five fewer seasons…

VitalStatistics.info politely asked to use this photo on their site for an article on Kobe. A first for me. Very cool.

Here’s the original photo:

I use LucisArt, www.lucisart.com, the "exposure" filter, on a background copy layer (usually) to get the effect. I also play with HDR, but only when I can get proper multiple exposures, for the reasons you rightly cite.

The Kobe photo is a lot more complicated (and not very well executed, as I look back on it now a few weeks later). In the original, you couldn’t see Kobe without really looking hard — he was lost against the background. (http://flickr.com/photos/ddwise/2058844301/in/photostream/)

So I created a selection of Perkins, Kobe, and Ray Allen — and the Parquet Floor — and reduced the brightness on everything else. It kind of looks like a strobe shot (it wasn’t — all available light and there was plenty of it) — but you can at least see Kobe.