Today's Image: "Doorknob"

Good afternoon and welcome back to Impacted Images. Today's image overview focuses on my newest HDR image, "Doorknob."

This image is an HDR (high dynamic range) photo and was created in Photomatix Pro 4.0.2 using these three images:

0.3 shutter speed

1.0 shutter speed

0.5 shutter speed

After combining the images to make an HDR image in Photomatix, I opened Photoshop and started to work on the photo. I first began by using the Shadows/Highlights adjustment layer to add fill light to the shadows and eliminate some of the highlights. I set the Shadows slider to 35 and the Highlights shadow only to 5 since there weren't many highlights to remove. I also used the Burn tool on the wall to the left and the light on the far right.

I removed the panel from the roof in the top right corner by selecting it and using the Content-Aware Fill command which is new in Photoshop CS5. This removed most of the panel, but I still had to touch it up with Photoshop's Patch and Clone tools.

Next, I applied the Bi-Color Filter from the Nik Color Efex Pro 3.0 Collection to add more saturation and warmth to the door and doorknob. However, I lowered the opacity to 95% since I did not want too much warmth for this image.

I also applied Color Efex's Tonal Contrast filter to add much more contrast to the image. It added a bit too much contrast to the picture, so I also lowered this layer's opacity to 95%.

Finally, I added Photoshop's Vibrance filter and set the Vibrance to 35 with the Saturation slightly lower at -7.

Here is the final image:

"Doorknob"

Thank you for visiting Impacted Images. I will continue to post more image overviews each day.