“Take everything from the inside and throw it all away
Cuz I swear for the last time I won’t trust myself with you” ~ Linkin Park

Are you standing by….watching…as life passes you by?

A little about this one……

This is a 5-bracket HDR tone-mapped in Photomatix 4 from my outing yesterday in downtown St. Louis. This was kind of a rush set-up because I was initially going to pass on the shot because the train was moving pretty slow and it took f/22 and an ND2 filter to get any kind of blur on the train.

This was taken with my crusty but trusty Sony a100 using the 18-55 kit lens, btw.

I’m still messing around with Perfect Photo Suite 7 and I thought this image was a nice candidate for a couple of the effects in Perfect Effects 4. I’ve been using the entire package a lot, but this image was all Perfect Effects 4. I’ve developed quite the affinity for the Kryptonite setting under Movie Looks as a base for many of my images and have been intrigued by the Firenza setting so I thought this image was perfect to pair the two up. I used Kryptonite at 100% on the entire image. Then I applied Firenze at 65% to just the train in order to bring out the warm rusty type tones. Then I applied Firenza again on top of that at 45% to the entire image to give a more uniform feel between the train and surroundings. I then painted the Firenza back out of the RR crossing gate at 45% opacity using the Perfect Brush setting, which was a huge help with the small details in terms of staying in the lines.

I’m certainly no expert, but I think this package is outstanding. Paired with Lightroom 4, it has completely transformed how I process. I previously used CS3 with PhotoTools 2.6 and I just grew tired of Photoshop’s cumbersome nature. Perhaps it was my own ignorance to Photoshop, but it just seemed like more of a hassle at times just to edit an image.

With this set-up I was able to edit several HDR’s yesterday (after 5 hours of shooting) in between cooking, playing with kids and looking at houses so the simplified processing and workflow fits perfect with my busy and often erratic lifestyle.

So thanks again to +onOne Software for making such awesome software and to+Brian Matiash who first inspired me to give OnOne a shot after seeing him use the software on so many of his awesome images.

I chose another shot from last March again for tonight’s post. This was from the same trip as the abandoned go-cart track. Just up the road from it, we found this old farm house with this bad-ass old TV just sitting in the living room. The house was very old but had been lived in recently enough to have carpet in the living room, but the rest of the house was still very dated . My brother and I were more impressed with this TV than anything else I think. Something like this is almost like an old muscle car in terms of the coolness factor. We both snagged several sets of brackets.

In regards to the processing, this would be the 2nd image processed completely with my new set-up in Lightroom 4 and Photo Suite 7. Unlike the last image though, this one if a 5 exposure HDR that also got pushed through Photomatix. So from Lightroom I exported the brackets to Photomatix and processed them using the Detail Enhancer before sending them back to Lightroom. I then sent them to Perfect Suite 7 for some Focal Point and Perfect Effects lovin.