Anyway, since we set it up late, we take it down even later. Most of our neighbors are already taking down their Christmas decorations. My tree will probably be here till the end of Carnival. Unless, since it is live, it starts loosing needles.

This gives me a fantastic object to even more fun with Christmas tree images. This time, I took out my macro lens. I was photographing in early afternoon, thus you can see two light sources reflecting in the beads- warm light from holiday lights and blue daylight. It was a really difficult task to adjust white balance on this image.

I shot it on the tripod, obviously- take a look at how long shutter speed I needed for moderate aperture of f/11. It gives actually quite shallow depth of field in the macro image- which I wanted. I wanted to exaggerate the perspective and show the length of the string. Putting the string on diagonal let me create a more dynamic, interesting image, as if I needed more to this bright red color.

I will post few more of the Christmas tree macros in the following weeks, so stay tuned.

After studying if for a while, I had an idea how I want to post-process it.
There are few things I like about the image. The light on the rail. The overall texture of old metal objects and certain industrial feel to the whole scene.
There are few things I wanted to change. The crop, for once, and straighten those bit crooked verticals? The color. It seemed to me the black and white conversion would work just fine in thus image. I also really wanted to do something about the wall on the far left.

I started from taking all five exposures into Photomatix. I usually just take two extremes and the middle exposure, but it is sometimes good to try something different. There is a black and white preset in the Photomatix, and I used it as a starting point. From there, I went through Tom Till’s HDR steps to finish the tone mapping. Then, it was time for Lightroom. I increased overall contrast, and added some more on the rail, to accent it even more as the main subject. I like images like that, you can be really liberal with the use of contrast, and it still looks good.

To preserve the moody feel, I played with the tone curve. I also used a lot of Local Adjustment brush touches, to reduce the light on the background elements and mostly, the objects on the shelf in the left side of the image. Sharpening and a bit of vignette, and done.

The combination of 5 exposures into HDR allowed me to preserve the red background of the wall behind the Christmas tree, adding some contrast to the image.

Meantime, I am working on the year summary post- to submit it again to Jim Goldstein annual project. Quite frustrating task at times. I already have few New Years resolution. 1) pay more attention to Tags, especially singular/plural like animal vs animals 2) do not put cityscapes into Landscape category, they have Urban Life especially for them.

On a short note today, to all my readers out there- Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays, regardless where you are!
Meantime, I am going to finish cooking all traditional Polish Christmas Eve dishes before evening of eating :).

It is really interesting to click through those presets. They are not only well made. It also gives you so many different interpretations of the image. And I am not talking about those over-the-board HDR effects with details enhanced to the point is not acceptable anymore. But just by changing the relation of shadows to highlight and overall brightness of the image, the atmosphere of the scene changes just with one click. I really like some of Fusion presets. Enhancer B&W gives you an idea how turning it into monochrome would look. But I typically choose one of other Enhancer presets and do my typical workflow from there, with finishing off in Lightroom, mostly to recover contrast.

And if you think you would like to check it out yourself, and have never used Photomatix (or made an HDR image), watch this short tutorial from Trey Ratcliff.

Many of you visiting the blog know, that I participate in several affiliate programs. Photomatix is not one of them (although I would not mind at all!). I talk about them on the blog, because I use their product for many years now, and it works for me just fine.

Meantime, take a look at this image of the medieval chapel. I took it, handheld, in The Cloisters. It is a branch of Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and a place where medieval art is displayed. They also have a beautiful garden with abundance of European plants- fruits, herbs- as you would see as part of the medieval monastery.

I don’t know about you, but the cloning is the most difficult task for me to do in Photoshop. There are two reasons for that. First – I do not have any significant amount of patience. The other one is the multitude of tools. I never know where to start. Well, I typically start from the tools which promise to get the job done for me. So Content Aware goes first. If after three tries that doesn’t give promising results, I move on to Patch tool. The last resort is Clone tool itself. I am sure it partially comes from the fact that I still cannot master the different setting on those tools, so their default behavior is hit-and-miss.

In the case of this image, the Content Aware did a decent job right away. The only problem it created was the fact I had to do it on original layer. I duplicated the layer afterwards, to make tweaking of subsequent changes easier to undo (remember that History is good only 20 last steps. When cloning, 20 strokes is hardly anything). So I cloned out the rough edges the Content Aware Fill created and even out the ceiling colors where the lamp was.

Afterwards, I took the image back to Lightroom to finish it of. I added some Clarity and Vibrance. I lightened the front part of the stair rail, and darkened the rest of it. I added a vignette to darken everything else and put focus on the rail. I sharpened both front of the rail itself, and overall the image.

There two lessons from this image. For cloning, to use more then one tool to achieve the optimum results of masking the corrections. And to look carefully at the image after you are done with global adjustments- if you see too bright spots where you don’t want to draw attention, and too dark spots where you do want to draw attention, use the Local adjustment to even them out with the rest of the image. This is the one lesson I learned from Michel Fry’s e-book on image post processing (“Light and Land. Landscapes in the Digital Darkroom” available from Craft&Vision) which made the biggest difference for my photography.