What’s Your Preference?

MarkyLandon · #1 (**permalink**) 05-21-2010, 09:58 AM

I've been meaning to try this shot for 3 years now but have missed the "Punchbowl" in it's full spring glory by a few weeks each time. This time, whilst catching it in full colour I was a little late in the day, I'd missed the golden hour around sunset and it was getting quite dark so I had to ramp the ISO up to get the shutter speed down to even 2 seconds @ f/18 (tripod mounted obviously. This image is 7 shots stitched together in photoshop. The colourfull bushes in bloom are azalias by the way, and this area of Windsor Great Park, " The Punchbowl" is famous for them.

The sky was completely blown out by the 2 second exposure so I replaced it with something a bit more interesting. Masking the trees was done by creating a layer mask using alpha channels (I chose red) and decreasing the levels to turn the foreground black whilst keeping the sky white, a simple colour selection was used to then create the mask. I "refined the edge" of the mask by expaning it and setting the blend mode to multiply to ensure there were no ugly halos where the new sky was punching through the mask. (for reference the sky is from another shot using an ND110 filter to give a streaky cloud effect from a very long exposure (2 minutes in broad daylight if I rmember correctly)

Finally I gave the composite shot a velvia film look using the channel mixer, incraesing each channel to 130% and reducing the other 2 by -15% to compensate and ensure no colour cast. The tutorial is here Velvia | Photo Effects