Mariners Village with a faked Orton

Mariners Village 8832 Orton, originally uploaded by brookville.

Every year the landscape architect at Mariner's Village does a new arrangement for the entrance. I took this shot just to the right of the entrance at Captain's Row.

I first did an HDR with the 3 exposures I took at +/-2 and 0ev. I used photomatix to generate the HDR and tonemap it. I pushed the gamma a little bit in photomatix also because even reducing light smoothing, I was still getting a dark image. My exposures had good histograms but it was an overcast day.

The HDR looked like this:



I took the photomatix output into Photoshop where I further adjusted the exposure.

I then copied the steps from a Michael Orton suggestion on his website and in his book. I started by duplicating the layer twice. I changed the blending mode to Screen on the top layer and merged down with the next layer.

I duplicated the resulting layer again and this time I Gaussian blurred it until the major shapes were there but it was really very much softened. I changed the blending mode of this layer to Multiply.

I used an image adjustment layer with the curves option and played around with the curves a little bit before just settling on the results of "auto."

I then flattened the image to what you see at the top of this post. There are lots of ways to adjust along the way including the radius of the Gaussian blur and the curve adjustment step. Of course you can do anything you want at this point but I was sticking to what I saw in his method of making an "Orton Sandwich."

The 0EV exposure can be seen here: