So I had a few minutes this afternoon to poke around outside and found these two palm trees with the sun directly behind the tree on the left. I didn’t have a strobe with me so i had an idea in my head to try something in post. A mini 2 image HDR.
Palm
ISO 1000 ƒ/22 T 1/160
Here’s the saved jpg from the original RAW file:
Decently exposed, but nothing special…. I wanted to pop the trunk on the left and mute the palm on the right. So in Aperture(Mac App Link) I did some basic levels adjustments and created two files from the master. One that I kept at the normal exposure which is here:
And one that I boosted the exposure to brighten the whole image:
I then imported both into Perfect Photo Suite 6, which created two layers. I placed the darker version on the top and used the Mask Tool to mask out the tree trunk and allow the trunk from the layer below to pop through:
I then opened the top layer up in Perfect Effects and added an autumn filter and applied that and then I opened up the bottom “trunk” layer and added a Radiance filter to that and here’s the saved version in Perfect Photo Suite 6:
I then saved the file back to Aperture and slightly sharpened the trunk and saved it. I think this turned out to an interesting image.