DSLR Photography Forum

Thanks to all of you who have posted on this technique elsewhere; I had been in blissful ignorance of this until last week and am finding it really useful(particularly as I was getting fed up with HDR as a means of effectively lowering dynamic range.
I converted this raw, shot in sunlight with a polariser, straight to mono, simulating red filtration so as to keep the sky dark.
As those of you familiar to this stuff will, like myself, then run into problems with green foliage darkening, I thought I'd try out contrast masking. Thankfully there were many here who explained this jargon-free and Zig-friendly.
I inverted the layered copy, setting it to "Overlay" in the options box.
I then recopied this layer several times so as to experiment with amount of gaussian blur, doing one layer with 50 pixels, another with 100, etc;
My final version, that you see below, was then:
1. Convert raw to tif; standard contrast with "red filtration";
2. Copied as layer set to overlay.
3. Inverted the copied image.
4. Took the copied, inverted layer, adding gaussian blur: I chose over 200 pixels, as I like the natural-looking effect that is suggestive of halation.(With values of lower than 100, the "halo" was too sharp: it looked like a naff use of Photomatix, actually). It looks "dodged and burned"....but on this occasion, folks, I promise you I did not dodge or burn a thing!
5. I was happyish by then but wondered what would happen if if I threw a bit of diffuse glow into it, so...
6....I lowered the bit rate to 8, so I could access Diffuse Glow, then working on a copy of the copied layer, added far too much diffusion. I could then adjust opacity of this layer to suit.
7. Discarded everything except the background image, and the inverted/blurred/diffused image, saved in the usual manner.
I maybe lost a little of the dramatic darkness of the sky but generally I am pleased that it rescued the foliage and prevented the corn from blowing out.

definitely going to have to try this sometime.

Thanks for the tutorial, the results are really nice. I'm a big fan of that photo. I may have to find one of my own so that I can follow along at home to be able to "get" how it works. Is there a certain type of photo -- underexposed, overexposed, high contrast, low contrast -- that you'd prefer to use this technique on?

Ello matthew!
Hmmm(thinkz)...thus far I've used it for 2 main types of shot: images with a wide dynamic range and those with high contrast, particularly when I've still found "hotspots" of blown out highlights. I'm also aware that I'm thinking of working at the raw stage: I've tried to use contrast-masking with blocky, contrasty jpegs with some success...but I've of course been unable to "put back" details that were not there to begin with. I think, all in all, that I've found this technique to work best in shots that have caused me dodging problems(eg, I'll be lightening a background only to find there's a distant window-reflection that always gets too hot when I dodge: the contrast-masking gives me a better start). I'd think that contre-jour landscapes really benefit from this...and because one's working with layers, I find there's more control over subtlety than,say,(my own efforts with) HDRs. By all means pm me if I've not explained this all terribly well; I'd be delighted to hear you get on too.

Thanks for the further explanation. I have some images from today that I can try it out on, with shadowed areas against a bright overcast sky. I'll see how it works and compares to HDR and 'straight' development. It certainly looks like an interesting result.

Great tutorial Zig. I don't do much B&W - but I sure like what you have done here.