That's a lot better Rob - not overdone but enhancing all the right bits.

Have you tried using tintii as the boat shot would appear to lend itself nicely to that effect.

Thought it was about time that I added a few together with the original photos for comparison:-

The place is called Red Rocks and it's near Wellington Airport.

You should have seen it in the 1960's when you had to walk there and before the blasted most of the actual red rocks into pebbles for peoples gardens. There were even WWI and WWII gun emplacements on top of some of the larger rocks between the end of the road (quarry site) and the stream at Red Rocks.

Devils Gate was a mere fissure that a single person fitted though not a 3 metre wide gap for the 4WD crowd.

Nice shots John.... Which program did you use to create them? And how many shots were used for each image?

Cheers

Dave.

Nice shots John.... Which program did you use to create them? And how many shots were used for each image?

After being convinced that the only way to get an HDR picture was to have at least three bracketed shots for Photomatix to be able to work, it seems that one single raw file can do the exactly the same job!

Maybe I should also have tried using five 'extracted/bracketed' exposures and seeing if that made any difference but, on the whole, I was happy with the one slight 'pseudo' and the other 'enhanced' results.

After being convinced that the only way to get an HDR picture was to have at least three bracketed shots for Photomatix to be able to work, it seems that one single raw file can do the exactly the same job!

Not really. One RAW file can give you a pseudo HDR but 3-5 bracketed photos will give a much better result.

Maybe I should also have tried using five 'extracted/bracketed' exposures and seeing if that made any difference but, on the whole, I was happy with the one slight 'pseudo' and the other 'enhanced' results.

Not really. One RAW file can give you a pseudo HDR but 3-5 bracketed photos will give a much better result.

As I said before, maybe I should have used bracketed exposures but if I had have done, then they would have been taken from the same single raw file so in theory the output would have been the same?

Do you also use Photomatix and if so, how do your results compare if you try it both ways or do you actually shoot five jpegs and just use those?

Do you also use Photomatix and if so, how do your results compare if you try it both ways or do you actually shoot five jpegs and just use those?

I'm not really much of a Landscape shooter I have played around with HDR for experimentation but it's not something I do often. I have tried the 1 shot vs 3 shot HDR experiment and imo you can see better results with the bracketed shot version over the single shot version but HDR is one of those things that is in the eye of the creator. I've seen some terrible imo HDR shots that are very cartoon like that the authors loved because that's the effect that they wanted and that's fine it's their work.