HDR-ing Reject Photos

[Remo Nonaz]

I've not been a fan of the HDR look but recently I down loaded the Lightroom presets from lightroomkillertips.com. Not having had any good opportunities to go out an take any new photos lately, I decided to mess around in Lr using a photo I took over a year ago in Death Valley.

Hmmm. What can I do with this? Well, I started with a no-star shot, added the HDR Strong Look to it, put in a reverse gradient filter on the dark clouds and a couple of other touches. Not too bad. Then I converted to black and white, added another gradient across the top, adjusted the contrast a bit and tweaked the colors... even better.

I guess it just goes to show that you shouldn't pre-judge something just because it doesn't run to your tastes. And, with Lightroom, there is potential in even the reject shots. 

[luxborealis]

In showing us how successfully you "rescued" an image from the "heap", you are going to make pack rats out of all of us! There is life after underexposure and we might never delete another image because of it!

At the same time, it's important to be constantly wary of processing "just because we can" and spending the time processing images that were unrated for a reason. I totally understand why you did this – not only does it allow you to see if it can be done, it is also an excellent way of digging into the depths of what you can do with Lightroom to learn the app more thoroughly.

Your final results are quite dramatic and are certainly food for thought. For me they venture into the "melodrama" of HDR, but that's the effect you were after. Thanks for sharing!

[John R Smith]

Hmmmm

It's really quite horrible, isn't it?

  John

[slackercruster]

V. Nice!

I love HDR from surreal to low key. So you don't have to make any excuses to me.

Keep blasting away!