Beside Still Waters

Beside Still Waters – Water – Photo

Good evening everyone,

This week is finally coming to an end. I’m starting to look forwards to the end of this semester so much that weekends simply mean one less week of school.

This image – Beside Still Waters – is one of my favorites recently. It is from up at the very top of CrabTree falls.

I’m slowly running out of images from my hike up the CrabTree falls trail. I reckon that means that its about time to make another hike/trip to somewhere.

Technically – In Terms of Processing

Today I want to share with you what I’ve been doing recently for my 32 bit tiff files. For a long time I took each set of bracketed exposures that I wanted merge to a 32 bit tiff file, into Photoshop’s HDR merge and then saved them back into Lightroom to do the work with Lightrooms Develop module.

Well I recently started to get tired of the many many steps to that it takes to do all of that. I started to look for an easier way to do it.

What spurred me on was a project for a client where I had about a hundred different sets of bracketed exposures to merge together. I simply dreaded the idea of carefully going through all the steps that I usually did.

So I started digging around and eventually ran across a Lightroom plugin that uses the same processing engine that Photomatix HDR software uses and creates a 32 bit tiff file straight from Lightroom. It has worked great ever since. I simply select the images I want to merge together, right click and choose export>>Merge to 32 bit tiff. A little box pops up with a few options, once you click ok the computer sits and churns a bit and voila you have a 32 bit tiff file to work with in Lightroom.

Now this system isn’t without its flaws. The biggest flaw that I found was that I would have liked to be able to do a batch process so that I didn’t have to key the computer each time I started a new set of brackets. But just having one step to perform instead of the six or so I normally did going through Photoshop’s merge to HDR was a great relief.

Once I had the 32 bit tiff file of this image I did basic edits in Lightroom and stylizing in onOne Software’s Perfect photo suite. Finally I popped into Photoshop for a few cleanup things and then back to Lightroom where I added a bit of a split tone before exporting the image.

So there you have it! I hope you have a splendid weekend.

Eldon