Disney's California Adventure - Night time at the pier, an attempt at HDR

[Bianca.Tarleton]

I took this a few weeks ago at Disneyland. The time exposure is set to about 30 seconds and this is one of my first attempts at an HDR.



My workflow was simple. I'm still working in Photoshop Elements 5 so unfortunately am limited in my HDR creating ability. I created a duplicate layer of my original, went into Enhance > Shadows/Highlights and cranked all three variables over to 100%, as I knew I would blend the result with my original. Changed the blending mode to Luminosity with 75% opacity. The rest is cleaning up the edges with dodge & erase. I would really like some help with matching the sky to the water.

I understand that this may not be a true HDR, as I don't have all the proper tools to create one. I've worked out of Photomatix basic in the past but am increasingly getting disappointed with ghosting and halos so I decided to try something new. I've got PSE8 waiting for me under the Christmas tree, so we'll see if I can put any future comments to good use. Thanks in advance, and please don't hold back.

[Ollievision]

It's beautiful!

[mpf777]

Overall I think this image looks really nice. I don't know to much about HDR so I will not really comment on that but the colors look nice and the reflections look good. If I wanted to be picky I would say it would be nice to have all the signage on the roller coster at the left frame all the way in but like I said that is being picky. Nice job!

Mike

[theArchitect]

Nice shot, espeically the reflection.

The only thing I would look into is the tower to the RHS of the wheel - it seems to be leaning to the left a little, you might want to rotate the canvas a bit if it doesn't upset the balance in the rest of the frame.

[wishvam]

awesome and its already better with a slight difference between the sky and water .. its my suggestion. and thanks for commenting my post..' red my favourite color..'

[Chicorob]

I like it. It doesnt scream obvious HDR to me which is nice. I use Photomatrix HDR for mine and if you arent careful in your adjustments it tends to go overboard. I have tried some shots at Disney but people always seem to ignore me and walk in front of me, even when there is almost no room.

[leviathan]

Great job with the colors and whatnot. I haven't the slightest clue on how HDR works, so I can't comment intelligently on that. Compositionally, I appreciate your attempt to capture essentially the mirror image of the scape on the reflection, however with its current composition it splits the image in half, of which I am not particularly fond.

[aprillove20]

Well nice reflection and composition. Well done.

[cacorcoran]

love the colors and the reflection. agree with the above nit-picky comment that all the roller coaster letters would have been nice, but still a nice capture.