Corsica - Corte HDR panorama in the morning clouds

Corsica - Corte in the morning clouds

Some words about the making of :

This is an HDR panorama made from 6 frames with three exposures for each frames so 18 images done with a long lens where used to produce this one. The result is an about 24 megapixels file.

As most often when shooting for HDR with a long lens i used a remotre controler plus mirror lockup instead of the intervalometer function of my camera, it avoids vibrations.

The nef files where first converted to 48 bits tif files with Silkypix. The only adjustments done here where just white balance and sharpening. For color and tones i prefer to work on the entire image.

The tif files where then stitched into a real HDR file with PTGui pro.

The HDR file was tonemapped in Photomatix, i find it easier than tonemapping in PTGui.

The tonemapped resulting tif file was lastely processed with SilkyPix for tones and colors adjustments.

Note : my general tips for HDR landscapes are here.

Green Africa

Green Africa - Mediterranean landscape

One shot from yesterday morning just after sunshine.
Made in Provence but the green patch made me think to Africa.

Nikon D200 and Sigma 10-20.
5 exposures converted to HDR and the tonemapped with Photomatix.
Resulting tif file post processed with SilkyPix.

SilkyPix a nice raw converter

As said in other posts, i always shoot raw to keep all the data my camera can capture. So the raw converter is a big key of my post processing workflow and choising the good software is very important. For more than one year i process all my raw files with SilkyPix.
It can process the raw files from near all digital cameras and if i'm not wrong from some digital backs. I mostly use some Nikon DSLR but i also have some cameras of other brands and it's nice to be able to use always the same tool for raw conversion.
SilkyPix has near all the functions someone can hope from a raw converter and the resulting files are of a very high quality.

White balance can be set to many predefined options or processed by SilkyPix. In all the cases it can be manually tuned in many ways.

Color rendition can also be tuned by editing color curves and/or use some predefined models. Still about colors, the software has a nice tool to make some selective fine tunings.

Same thing for tone and contrast : you can choose some predefined settings and/or edit it by tuning the tone curve or using some sliders to change contrast, gamma and black level.

SilkyPix also have many options for sharpening and noise reduction and it's not so hard to obtain some very clear and detailed photos.

So, what's wrong :
The highlights recovery tool is not of an easy use. It's better you don't overexpose your photos.
I think it's missing an easy tool to push up the shadows like the DLightening tool of Nikon Capture.
I'd like to be able to compare side by side two versions of the same raw file processed with different parameters.