Autumn Duck Pond Sussex Final With more blue sky making an appearance on Tuesday I took a bike ride over to Pulborough, a small West Sussex town just north of the South Downs. I did some exploring from maps to find some of the small ponds and lakes in the area. The idea was to get autumn trees reflected in the water.

This shot was taken at Nutbourne a village a few miles from Pulborough. I took quite a few wind angle shots of various ponds in good sunny skies. Strangley this was the best and was taken after the clouds had moved in and a nearby bonfire had made the light even poorer. It was taken with a long lens.

The picture was taken handheld with a Sony A700 with a Tamron 28-150 zoomlens at 150mm.

The original RAW image was opened in Camera Raw and 2 additional images were created at +2EV and -2Ev for a “false HDR” with each image having Noiseware Pro applied.  A Photoshop action I had saved was used to create the extra images automatically. The images were saved as tiffs. 

Photomatix

The 3 images at 2EV separation were outputted in Photomatix to Detail Enhancer.

Photoshop

First the minus 2 EV layer was copied in, excluded with a black layer mask and then a white brush used to bring it in and tone down highlight areas.

Detail was brought back in with Topaz adjust with HDR presets group with Pop Smooth preset with adjustments. Some areas, mainly highlights were excluded from the effect by applying Topaz on a duplicate layer with a layer mask.

General adjustments in levels and curves to enhance.

Hue saturation adjustment layer was used with a layer mask to reduce blue saturation in an area to the top. A second hue saturation layer was used to reduce red saturation and a layer mask used to apply it only to the branches at the top where the processing had come out too red.

Layers flattened before going on to sharpening.

Duplicate layer Noiseware Pro and a little sharpening.

Second duplicate layer with mask to apply extra sharpening and contrast with low amount and high radius using Unsharp mask (Clarity Effect) The settings were 33 amount and 33 radius.

BEFORE AND AFTER

Below are the Before and After images. First the original exposure. Then the tonemapped image and then the final result.

Original at 0EV

Autumn Duck Pond Sussex Original

Tonemapped image

Autumn Duck Pond Sussex Tonemapped

Final Image

Autumn Duck Pond Sussex Final

Edwin Jones