so which one's real?

Sure you know the answer - these are just pictures!

But which depicts reality 'best'?  Ah, that trigger word, as though every possible variable can be solved and one answer proclaimed as The Answer.  Art doesn't work that way, and as precise as imagers want their shot to be it's still an artistic rendering of reality.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

The shot on the left is 'real' in that the camera took it as is - but then processed it according to the rules I set (or the settings that I forgot to change!), compressed it to fit on my memory card 'better', and that was that.

On the right, our ReDynamix offering.  ReDynamix software isn't true HDR but it sure can look that way if you want it to.  I don't want it to, but sliding a few sliders can take you from the left-side image to wild and crazy HDR effects in a hurry.  This software plugin can do some cool things - it brought out some detail in the flower petals as well as the leaves, and boosted the background but not in a distracting way.  It's a fun product that I enjoy using, and recommend the next time you have about $20 - or just try the free sample, that's what I did.

But while it's fun and revealing of detail, let's face it: I messed up the wonderful color of the bloom. The K-5 did a great job with white balance here!

I blew it.

I took an interesting photo with the K-5 recently.. but I blew the highlights.  I also used jpeg and so blew the opportunity to make it better with some easy processing.  It wasn't too badly blown though, so I decided to pull it into Elements 9 to see what could be done.

Once I had it in I did a quick crop and a bit of rotation, to eliminate a lot of boring background.  At that point I could use my SmartCcurve plugin and adjust colors to get things looking a bit better.  In this case I decided to use my new ReDynamix plugin, which can do many of those things and offers the opportunity to add some HDR-type effects as well.




I've mentioned in the past that HDR is not my cup of tea, at least not the typical "HDR!!" that I often see online.  That sort makes great images for fantasy-epic novel covers, but for capturing something that I experience on planet Earth I just don't get it.  I found ReDynamix online for cheap (and a free trial) and found that it could be restrained to my less ambitious style, so it now has a bit of space on my hard drive for images like this and days like today to play with them.



In the RyDynamix module I knocked down the gamma to allow for some reduction of the overexposure, then played with the sliders.  I generally turn down saturation and vivid-color choices, then tone down the dynamic-light strength to about half what it chooses as its default.  From there I move things around a bit, and then moved over to curves and color-enhancement modules.  I found the tree beginning to look like a series of peeling brass pipes, and I liked it - so I nailed down the HDR portion, added a pinch of sharpening and came up with the lower image.



I like the result here, as it brought back much of the blown-out areas. It also saturated the colors and adjusted the balance without proclaiming itself an "HDR!!" masterwork. And it took less than ten minutes of processing on a jpeg image. I still prefer the raw option, but it's good to know I can improve on a non-raw image without breaking it. This image was taken with my 'new' SMC-M 40mm pancake lens - I owned this once many years ago, sold it in 2008 when I bought into Sony's system. I missed this lens when I returned to Pentax, and this copy looks like a good one. Gosh it's thin!

p.s. if you don't recognize the tree, I assure you it's not sick and dying - it's a madrone/madrona tree, Arbutus menziesii, and its peeling bark is a giveaway. It should be more red, but when the brassiness came over it in processing I enjoyed it.. so much for realism in my imaging, I suppose!