New York City Sunrise

[duboisst]

My first Cityscape set. 2nd Panorama shot from Weehawken, NJ on 12/27/2014

[DwayneOakes]

Works for me, cool blue lights in the water reflection.

[stamper]

HDR on steroids? Too strong for my taste. Do you have a more restrained version? The content of the image looks fine but not the rendering.

[Bob_B]

Interesting. I'm not sure about the color/HDR, but, to my eyes, nothing seems horizontal: not the clouds, not the water level, and not the city scape. (Probably too much coffee this morning.)

[thierrylegros396]

HDR on steroids? Too strong for my taste. Do you have a more restrained version? The content of the image looks fine but not the rendering.

The processing does not work for me.

Is this the real sky or an replaced one.

And yes the content looks fine.

[Iluvmycam]

Crazy sky! Love it!

[duboisst]

Yes I have another one.. no HDR at all.. I hate HDR and am a purist.. I'll post the wider one that was later in the morning on this day with less contrast. I just hate the restraints this website does on images. Panoramas need to be larger then 1024X I and just about everybody at work use this for their backgrounds. The detail pops at higher resolutions. I guess I need my own website now that I'm taking photography seriously again after 25 years.

[duboisst]

Thanks! as you know it means a lot to hear it.
-Steve

[duboisst]

Thanks Dwayne,
Coming from you that's a lot!
-Steve

[duboisst]

I appreciate your response; I find myself looking at photos now and wondering if the backgrounds, foregrounds, skies have been replaced, if they are HDR or not. If the moon has been dropped in. Other artist do it more and more often, I think there's nothing wrong with it except I can't help but feel deceived in some way. I have recently returned to photography and have decided I will try to mirror what my eye sees and only adjust the sliders in post production to my taste. Nothing I post has anything added. I may heal-out a fence post in the lower edge of a panorama or crop the image but I don't see myself ever adding anything to what nature and the available light provided. What I seek is the sharpest details, using the best equipment I can afford and am working hard to on techniques to reduce as much post-production as possible.
Again thanks for your comment and I completely understand why you feel that way.

[thierrylegros396]

If you use Lightroom, try to begin with default settings.

Simply adjust exposure to have no clipping.

You'll obtain something very natural.

Sometimes you need to increase/decrease contrast.

As Jeff Schewe (and others) said, follow the proposed order for the corrections (top to bottom).

Have a Nice Day.

Thierry

[spidermike]

I will admit first off that the colour are rather too 'intense' for my liking and I am willing to accept that this is the way you saw it at the time.

However (you could tell there was one of those coming, right?), I think that we see a scene that makes us go 'WOW' and so we take a picture. When we get back to the computer and open the image what we have is a straight image with none of the emotional/environmental ties that hit us when we saw the scene au naturel. And a way of recreating that 'WOW' factor can be to (inadvertently or deliberately) process the image to recreate the 'WOW' by another means.
Maybe that's all a bit too philosophical a point for this particular post but it is how it strikes me: I think thierry's approach is quite a measured one.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

Mind to post the unedited one?

[superduckz]

No problem with the colors as I've seen sky's like this often on the coast when the sun dips below them.  a little oversharp for my taste but otherwise fine.  As has been mentioned, there is an illusion that it's tilted right because of the the angle of the shoreline and clouds. I'd be tempted to work the aspect ratio a tad to correct it.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

... there is an illusion that it's tilted right because of the the angle of the shoreline and clouds...

Not an illusion, and not because of the shoreline, etc. Verticals are not vertical.

[duboisst]

As requested.. All sliders at 0 and non-cropped

[spidermike]

Now to me that is more what I would expect (as a photo).
The sky in he first post is, ot me, quitebelievable even given some of the spectacular skies I have seen over the years - the part I am less comfortable with is the buildings. The eye-brain combination has a remarkable ability to adjust its 'exposure' in different parts of the same scene and blend them together but in trying to replicate it here I think you have hit the limits of the dynamic range the camera is able to deliver when recovering such deep shadows so it is unable to show a lot of textures the eye would see on real life.

This is not to criticise the photo as a photo but is why the rendition in the first post does not do it for me and, as has been said, it is about personal taste.

Thank you for posting the second version anyway - not many people would and it has proved interesting.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

As requested.. All sliders at 0 and non-cropped

Halelluya!

If that is what you can get straight out of camera, you should be legally prohibited from post-processing 

[duboisst]

Haha Slobodan you are too kind! thanks!

[duboisst]

You are welcome, and thanks again for the feedback.
-Steve