December 1, 2013
Rocks At Sunset, Bandon Beach, Oregon

The clouds were really promising last night at Bandon Beach. They were nicely textured above and towards the west, but turned out to be too solid near the western horizon. This image was made shortly before sunset with the best color on the clouds. At and shortly after sunset, these clouds had no interesting color at all, but a fantastic orange glow filled the sky way to the south — grrr.

This image was made from three captures and combined by hand in Photoshop because my Photoshop Realistic HDR Technique didn't produce good results. The first problem was that the 32-bit file looked a bit flat and then converting it to 16-bit using the "Flat" HDR Toning preset really washed out the image. The best 32-to-16-bit conversion I could obtain was done with the "Saturated" HDR Toning preset with reduced Vibrance and Saturation, however the brightest part of the sky was really blown out. So much for an easy HDR process within Photoshop. Just out of curiosity while working up this blog entry, I tried the Lightroom HDR technique and that wasn't much better than the Photoshop Realistic HDR Technique. The brightest part of the sky wasn't blown out, but that whole area was really blocky.