A Landscape and a Note on Editing

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Digital photography has given birth to an industry of photo manipulation and editing software. This is feeding a growing interest in filters and presets, the application of filters being an art unto itself. In the manipulation of photographs, HDR software was and is king. Cameras cannot see the breadth of shadow and light our eyes see. The idea is that by combining a number of frames of the same subject at different exposures we can get a more realistic result. Practically that was hard to do and most of the time people erred on the side of the more tonality the better. The HDR look was something you loved or hated. Time and taste move on and it is now easier to get realistic results and err on the side of less is more. Aurora HDR by MacPhun, (Mac only), is one of those tools and while over the top is possible, more realistic results are equally easy. This particular shot is a fake HDR, I made copies of the photograph at one Fstop under, one over and one spot on. The result is not far off from the original, just enough to bring out more of the detail and shadows. (Note: another experiment I intend to try, as suggested by Sherry Lynn Felix, are luminosity masks in Photoshop, I just have to find the right photograph to experiment on.)