Japanese Cave – Bukittinggi, Sumatra
Recently I joined another photography community on Google +. There are a lot of them and I limit mine to those either featuring HDR photography or iPhoneography. So this new group I joined is called Lightroom and Photoshop Users. Sounds boring, right? Would only geeks, like me, ever be in such a place?
Well, yes, actually. I need Lightroom 4 for HDR and occasionally Photoshop, to do what I do. There is always new fun stuff to learn and use in my art so I joined this group to find out what I can learn and what I can give back from what I know. To introduce myself to the group this morning, I posted this photo and some sparse processing notes for it. People seemed to be interested in this HDR photo and I was asked if I had the original file so he could compare it with the finished version. See? Geeky! I warned you.
It’s cool. If you’ve gotten this far, you are officially a geek too. So celebrate that about yourself! I’m pretty sure that any geek would also want to know:
Topaz DeNoise does a really great job but, YIKES!, it can take a long time to go through all the settings for all the different noise types and color channels. I guess all those little sliding controls is like being in heaven for a geek though? Anyway, then you have to repeat that on all THREE photos since we’re doing HDR! I’m not complaining, just letting you know the pains I go to because I love making these photos so much and I value the quality of things with my name on them.
Also, if I’m going to tote a tripod all the way to Sumatra and then actually USE it down in this cave, I figure I need to honor all that work, planning, & care becuase, only now, do I have the opportunity to process the best quality that I can coax out of my present gear. By the way, I don’t have a professional grade camera, It’s a Nikon D-90 I picked up about three years ago when I resumed my passion for photography and wanted something decent to shoot with. That shiny new Nikon showed up in my life just a few months before the day I saw my first HDR photo.
Like a true geek, since that day, I have been in love with HDR photography and finding out all I can about it. So I join Google+ HDR groups, to see what others are making and always open to learning how to do new things. Because Lightroom is the Mothership of my workflow, I wised up and also joined the Lightroom group on Google+. I will learn more there too.
When HDRsoft released their Lightroom plugin last summer I was pretty excited, like a true geek would be, right? I even wrote a special blog post about processing Lightroom HDR with it. By the way, if you decide you want to give Photomatix a try, you can save 15% if you use the promo code “PerfectHDR” when you buy. Before you buy, download their free trial. It will leave a messy watermark on your photo but you’ll get a chance to see how cool it is before you buy. So make an HDR and impress Mom.
After merging the three shots in Photomatix, I did everything else right inside Lightroom 4. I happened to be on my Macbook Air, processing this while I was still on my trip. With the smaller screen, pared-down digital darkroom, and my bad eyes, it’s much harder to process than here on my 27-inch iMac. The only other filter I used to process this shot was Color eFex Pro 4 by Nik Software. I find that the Contrast Color Range module is very helpful and I used it here.
If I missed anything, just ask me in a comment below. By the way, *wink*, commenting on my blog earns you a do-follow link to your blog because I use CommentLuv.
Sorry I sort of meandered. My right brain is growing these days and some evenings it just seems to take me where it wants to go. I’m fine with that and use those right-brain energy surges to light some candles, dim the lights, sit at my iMac, and process another HDR photo or two. I will be doing that as soon as I finish writing and post this.
Remember, back up at the beginning of this post I said that this nice guy on Google+, Zach Spangler, wanted to see the original file to compare? Here it is. Simply exported the RAW from Lightroom 4 as a TIFF.
In case anybody wants to know about this cave, let me fill you in some. It’s located in a very cool town of Bukittinghi in the mountains of West Sumatra. It’s actually UNDER the town. This is part of a huge network of tunnels that the Japanese dug when they had business there in Indonesia a lot of decades ago.
In this photo, the big lit tunnel going off to the right behind the bars is where the Japanese kept the things that blow up. See the red sign over the arch “Buang Ammunisi”?
Strangely enough, Captain Photo has never been the captain of anything, except his golf team in high school. He was on a big boat once, a cuise ship, and was banned from the bridge while offering to help navigate after leaving the ship's nightclub at 3 AM.
What I, Captain Photo, can do for you is to help sail the stormy seas of HDR photography. It's treacherous out there. I've been shipwrecked more than once. (I wasn't Captain those times)
Read the blog and learn the easy and inexpensive process of making Perfect HDR photographs that beginners will love and will make your friends begin to reassess and elevate your worth! You'll quickly be sailing smooth and making amazing images!
~Captain Photo 
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Nice shot and processing. Would you mind sharing the slider settings ilightroom? I started planting with the plugin after seeing you mention it in another post.
I can give you a good starting point with the sliders.
First thing, it’s funny about that plugin. Sometimes the merged files come back into Lightroom very dark, other times very blown out but, either way, just hit the “auto” button to get the exposure to a reasonable starting point. Fine tune the exposure to your liking Then, in most cases, I adjust the highlights slider most or all the way to the left and the shadows slider far to the right and nudge up the clarity a little. These settings give me a point of departure for the fun & creative part of the processing.
I make heavy use of the “adjustment brush” to locally enhance colors, textures, etc. Sometimes I will also use the NIK or Topaz plugins, depending on what I am going for.
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