Monica Thanks for the love, Matt...such beautiful photos! I just came back from the Dominican Republic, and I look forward to trying this on my own captures :) Oct 13, 2008 ~ 6:42am
Matt Nicolosi Hey there. The architecture shots were done in Lightroom where I applied a 300 preset that Ive modified a bit to to make it a little less harsh and less contrasty than it is by default. The 300 preset was free and I got it a year ago or so. You can probably Google it, although there may be more than one now since it seems to be a popular look (based on the movie 300). They were all shot with an 85mm f/1.4 lens shot wide open at f/1.4 to get the shallow depth of field.
The first lily pad landscape image was an HDR image where I shot one raw image and processed 5 different exposures in Lightroom (+2 EV, +1 EV, original, -1 EV, -2 EV). Then I combined these 5 images into one HDR image is Photomatix Pro.
I dont remember on the last image. I used a 14-24mm lens and then bumped the contrast using a curves adjustment layer. Then I added a dodge/burn layer to punch in some emphasis in a couple spots. Then I think I duplicated an edited layer and gaussian blurred it and reduced the opacity while masking the middle to emphasize a sharp focus in the middle of the image. I added a little vignetting on that image to.
Hope that helps.
Oct 13, 2008 ~ 1:09am
Sarah Castor Very Nice! My favorite is the one with the lilies in the water but you can see the beautiful sky! did you use a polarizing filter for that one or did you just photoshop it? If you don't mind me asking. :)
Oct 8, 2008 ~ 1:36pm
Jason Drumm Thanks Matt! Have a safe trip back. Great stone building! Too bad you can't bring it back with you - most of Texas is supremely lacking in good historic looking buildings like this that might provide great backgrounds for a location shoot. We should build some now for the benefit of photogs 100 years from now - with their 12 Gigapixel cameras.
Oct 8, 2008 ~ 1:27pm
kendra That last one looks like one of those motivational posters!
I'd like to know what you did to the original images too. It would be even better if we could see screen shots of the steps, or at least the SOOC. It's really motivating for those of us who are clueless about what makes for great post processing.
Oct 8, 2008 ~ 7:53am
Candy I absolutely love your "filler". Wanna share what post production work you do on these? Actions? A little special love?
Oct 8, 2008 ~ 1:54am