Blanket of Winter Over Spring Final

This was a very low bush of flowering Heather.

The picture was taken handheld with a Sony A550 with a Tamron 28-200 zoom at 55mm and F5 for narrow depth of field.   One RAW image was opened in Photoshop Camera RAW first to create 3 extra exposures for HDR at 2EV separation. Each image was noise reduced with Noiseware Pro and saved as tiffs. 

This picture was enhanced with HDR processing followed by Topaz Adjust and Photoshop to bring in more detail. I used 2 Topaz layers with masks, one was to reduce detail in the background and the other to increase detail in the flowers and snow in the foreground.  

Photoshop

Topaz adjust was used to adjust detail differently in the foreground and background. The first adjustment reduced detail considerably from the original. A layer mask was used to remove the effect from the flowers in the foreground and the nearest snow so that area kept its original details.

A second layer with a mask was used and a Topaz adjustment used to increase detail more in the nearer flowers.

The brightness tool was used with a layer mask to reduce brightness only on the highlights.

Vibrance was increased slightly by 17 points.

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. A layer mask was again used to exclude this effect from everything except the nearer snow and flowers, again to bring out and separate the foreground from the rest of the image.

The clone tool was used to tidy up some parts to remove distractions on the corners and edges..

BEFORE AND AFTER

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

Original at 0EV

Blanket of Winter Over Spring Original

Tonemapped image

Blanket of Winter Over Spring Tonemapped

Final Image

Blanket of Winter Over Spring Final

For licence see Blanket of Winter Over Spring

Edwin Jones