This part of the HDR Photography Workflow series is mainly image heavy.  It consists of a lot of screenshot that will hopefully describe what I’ve done within Photoshop.  I am not a photoshop professional and I have never taken any formal training on the software.  I hope you have atleast a bit of experience with the program. If not feel free to ask questions if you need a bit more information. I like Photoshop because it is what I am comfortable with today. I am not used to making major adjustments in Lightroom or other programs at this point.  Maybe in the future.  Use whatever software you want or have.  The main idea behind this step is that your image can have a life after tone mapping in Photomatix. Most people may think that it ends at Photomatix and then you post it online or do whatever.  You can further tweak your photograph!

In the first 2 photos below, I am just simply adjusting the levels.  Photomatix leaves the photograph a bit flat, and that’s partly my fault because I didn’t want to change the black and white points too much. I do it here instead. To get to here, I selected the adjustment layer option in the layers window and chose levels.  I got the little pop up box that you see over top of the picture.  I moved the arrows in closer to where they start at the histogram.  I think of it as starting at the bottom of the mountain instead of in the water.  Kind of weird but whatever eh.  The blacks in the image start to show a bit better and it ads some contrast.

Next, I Merge the 2 layers – Hold shift and drag the sky layer on top of the layer for the building [left image below] and Invert the mask [right image below] so that you can then paint with white to reveal the sky layer.

Starting to paint with white over the sky at 100% opacity.  So you just have to select the brush tool to do this part.  Sometimes you have to adjust the brush size and hardness.  I am painting at 100% because I can adjust the opacity of the layer if I want later.  Below is part of the sky  painted on the left and a picture of the bit of change in the mask.  Hopefully you feel the same way as me: It looks better under there.

Get in Close for the tighter areas.  This is where you’ll want to change the size of the brush and zoom in.  It looks a bit weird but your looking at maybe 300% zoom here.  It’s just to clean in here and then you can zoom out and it should look pretty good!

Painted fully – You can see the image is looking better [I hope you're still with me anyways] and on the right hand side you can see the mask and the white area is the painted sky.

What I will end up doing next is merging the layers so that I have one layer again.  I usually like to atleast check out Nik Color Efex [A filter plugin for Photoshop] to see what I can fix up.  In this case I noticed a green hue to the image and I wanted to lose that. So I thought of the “Remove Color Cast” in Nik Color Efex.  Below is an image of me going to the filter setting to select the Nik Plugin. Removing the Cast could be done with other settings however, I like the realtime view and easy adjustment in Color Efex.  Before going into Color Efex, I create a duplicate layer copy so that I can create another mask if I want.

So once into Color Efex, it looks like the image below. It’s pretty cool all the options you have within it.  On the right hand side you can see that I have the option to remove the color cast.  I moved the slighter to the green section because that is what I felt was weird about the image and as much as I like green…It wasn’t there that day.  It has a 100% preview window in the bottom corner as well! Check that out because you can see the before and after there.

Now what? Well, I seem to want to tweek the color a little further.  In the white, and part of the sky, I feel as if there is a bit of magenta coming in.  I decided to go for an adjustment layer – Hue/Satuation.  I made the following setting changes and I felt a bit better about the overall change.

The next image is the final result that I am feeling good about now.  The only final thing I did before coming to this image is cloning.  I cloned a little bit of the top right corner. I tried to make the corner a little less dark. Oh, I also cloned a few spots within the water that my eyes found distracting.  This is something you would never notice in person as you view the entire scene.

I tried to find a balance in the image.  The top image is totally aggressive and I couldn’t have left it like that.  I like this final image because, inside me, it feels good. I do want to take this image into software now to reduce some of the noise though.  It will improve it a little bit further.  This section really was a lot of screen shots.  I tried to just edit it and screenshot the steps I was doing.  I’ve never done a tutorial like this so it’s definitely a learning experience.  Feel free to make comments or ask questions in the comments.

Now that we’ve edited the photograph to our liking we’ve got an optional step:

Turn down the noise in the image…