HDR photography, like it or not? I love it. Of course, like many others I don’t like it overdone, and I know sometimes its difficult to know where and when you are crossing the line, so my take is that if I think I went too far, then I probably did. So I always go for the realistic look, and try to find and use the best and new tools or acquire knowledge to accomplish that.
And talking of new tools, this week NIK Software released the NIK HDR EFEX PRO plug in, and at first I didn’t even wanted to try it, because I am really used to my Photomatix Pro workflow and pretty much mastered the way I process the images there and I still playing around with the new 4.0 release. But after seeing some comments and being a fan of other NIK plug ins I decided to give it a try and I installed it yesterday, I don’t pretend by any means to make a revision because there are plenty of those already out there, but in a short paragraph here is how it worked for me.
I just tried with a couple of images, and I really like it, the integration with Lightroom is great and at first looks slower to process than Photomatix, but I believe the overall process goes faster, you have multiple options and pre-sets, and you can go crazy with them, I tried some of them and played a little bit, but at the end I went with the standard more subtle version, just like I do in Photomatix, to finish the process in Lightroom and Photoshop as I always do, and one of the things that I noticed is that there is less noise in the image, and I love that. Like I said I got the photograph out of the plug in almost flat and I finished processing it in Lightroom and Photoshop. I am planning to keep trying out NIK HDR EFEX PRO, and I’ll probably decide to keep it.
The picture was taken in Arizona over Route 66 and it is a 5 bracket exposure, I used the Nikon D700 with the 14-24 wide angle lens.