they look nice.

just bought the Canon Rebel xsi. took a few pictures to break open the seal.

i like it, did you crop out like 1/3 of the pic (on the left)?

and how are you getting such soft skies?

I didn't crop it at all. And when you say soft skies do you mean the soft gradient? idk, it just sorta came out that way I guess. I'll be happy to share how I post-processed it, though for the most parts it's the same as what I posted earlier in this thread apart from a few tweaks here and there.

I'm wondering how you got the road so relatively straight compared to the right side of the photo? my initial thought was a wide angle lens with the road in the middle and then a crop, but I guess that isn't how you did it

I'm not sure I get what you mean.

It's at 18mm though.

I am slightly confused as well, almost looks like there is slight distortion from the lens on the right side of the image, but not left side. -- ehhh after looking closer I think this is just an illusion from you standing at the correct angle to keep the road straight. and at 18mm there shouldn't be any lens distortion anyways.

I had wondered how u got such nice colors, how the processing was done, but I now see that you created an HDR

nice image

I wasn't really trying to get the road straight. lol. I just knew I wanted to get an off-center vanishing point type thing going on with the road, and then get the field in the rest of the pic. I just jumped out of my car and snapped it.

Thanks for the compliments.

hand held HDR? or was it created from a RAW image as opposed to 3 5 or 7 jpeg images?

Hand held HDR. 3 RAWs.

Me and a mate went messing around with a tripod, self timer and of course photoshop. Tutorial for the effect is here - http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/re...ssage=29840217

wow i like this a lot. good job!

I just came back from a big trip in SE Asia

If you don't mind can you go into some detail about what you did to this and the pic above? I probably get into landscapes more than anything else, and your pictures are inspiring to me tbh.

+1 to that, I'd love to get some local shots of the same effect to print large.

Alright, for the last pic I posted:

In Photomatix:
Tonemapping settings:

Strength: 100
Color saturation: 50
Luminosity: 6
Light smoothing: high
Microcontrast: 5
White point: 1%
Black point: 2%
Temperature: 3
Saturation shadows: 6
Micro-smoothing: 0

Almost all of these tweaks vary widely from picture to picture, though. The only ones which don't are strength and light smoothing. Light smoothing should always be on high or very high (I usually use very high).

Photoshop:

New adjustment layer >> curves >> linear contrast (sometimes I do medium contrast, depends on the picture)
New adjustment layer >> curves >> darker, then lessened the amount some (once again it varies from picture to picture, sometimes I use the lightener)
New adjustment layer >> hue/saturation >> Yellows +10 (obviously varies)
New adjustment layer >> vibrance +80 (varies)
Filter: LuicsArt 3D >> sculpture >> smooth detail below 10, percent processed below 15. I don't always use this plugin...in fact I just reinstalled it for my last picture. It's kind of like an unsharp mask, but better. Gives the image some "pop"...some more detail. Makes clouds look great. If I don't use this filter, I use sharpen >> unsharp mask.
Lastly, some noise reduction. I used to use Neat Image. I used Noiseware Pro for the first time on my last pic. I have both as Photoshop plugins.

Honestly though, I'd just advise you to read these tutorials:

http://www.stuckincustoms.com/hdr-tutorial/
http://www.vanilladays.com/hdr-guide/

They explain things much better and in much more detail than I do.

This perhaps isn't a very smart question... When I take pictures in sunny weather they look good. In cloudy weather they always look really boring. Is there any way around it?

Play with curves and levels and saturation in photoshop if you can

Don't take pictures when it's cloudy...

Unfortunately, it's kind of hard to make flat light look interesting. You can try futzing with the color in Photoshop but it's hard to get something that doesn't look like it was overly shopped. You can try making them black and white, which is more dependent on contrast than the quality of the light. You can also use fill flash to add some more light to the scene.

Tiger exhibit in Chiang Mai




mb this one is a little pretentious. I dunno, I thought the framing was kinda cool

took one of my cat.

I find I often like it better if I take the pictures with exposure adjustment to -0.5 (so they end up darker) and then adjust them myself in Lightroom. That way the highlights aren't overexposed while the dark bits can be recovered imo.

Is that fairly normal or am I doing something wrong?