I don't normally spend a great deal of time with my pictures. Most of them are published after no more than 10 or 15 minutes work but there are occasional images that I've been tweaking for years and this is the grandpa of them all.

The original exposures for this picture were shot back in 2004 on a Nikon D70 and, dare I admit, in JPEG. This was the first time I experimented with blending multiple exposures to give a better representation of a scene and this was about 18 months before I first heard the expression "HDR". The original shot was processed in Photoshop using layer masks to manually select which pieces of which exposure I wanted to be visible.

I've produced several versions of this image since (I replaced the sky here, for example) but was never 100% happy with the result. In the sky replacement image, there is some nasty fringing in the trees and there was pretty horrendous chromatic aberration in the originals which I failed to correct and ended up painting out by desaturating the magenta and cyan fringing (sorry!).

Move on to 2011 and it was definitely time for another, possibly final, attempt to reprocess the exposures. This time, I used Lightroom to remove the chromatic aberration then exported to Photomatix Pro where I used the Exposure Fusion mode to blend the original 6 images. The result then went to Photoshop where I blended in the best sky (the version added by Photomatix wasn't great) and added 3 Hue/Saturation and 5 Curves layers, most with masks, to muck with particular areas. After all this, maybe another 45 minutes work, I'm left with this version.

Hopefully this one will stick for at least another couple of years before I go back to the JPEGs again! Mind you, now that I look at it, some of the colours in this version are rather intense so perhaps there is a chance you will see a 2013 version after all :-)

Posted on Sunday, January 16th, 2011 in: All Images, Landscape, Travel, austin, cave, hamilton pool, Landscape, overhang, pool, rock, swimming hole, texas, tx, waterfall

Comments (4)

You are welcome to comment on this photo.

• John Sotiriou on January 16th, 2011 at 7:07 pm

  Spectacular!
  John Sotiriou´s last post ..Off Street Parking

• Mike Olbinski on January 17th, 2011 at 8:33 am

  Wow, this is awesome! What an amazing place.
  Mike Olbinski´s last post ..The Lobby

• Dave Wilson on January 17th, 2011 at 9:05 am

  Thanks, gents. I was lucky on the day that I visited – there had been a storm the previous week so the creek (and hence the waterfall) was flowing well. Also, the bacteria levels in the pool were deemed unsafe so swimming had been banned for a couple of days.

• Jesse Pafundi on January 17th, 2011 at 9:08 am

  I think you can put the stamp on this one. Just an awesome place and processed nicely
  Jesse Pafundi´s last post ..I Am Legend

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