Dura77
New Member
Thanks!!! You have fantastic photos as well!
Thanks for the compliments! Settings wise it's quite standard. Usually shot around f8 to f11, focused at hyperfocal distance. Since I mostly do HDR panos, I usually bracket the exposures 0eV, ±1.3eV exposed for the sky. Largely depends on your camera's dynamic range capabilities. For sharpening I just use lightroom sharpening with masking up to around 80, depending on the scene. Oh and of course, use a tripod.
Well, the most important factor required for vibrant photos would be the weather and the time you take the photos. If it isn't good there really isn't anything much you can do, but I'll usually try a B&W rendition in that case. So try to shoot during the golden hours or blue hours. It would help to make your photo 'pop' more. For single raw exposures you could take a look at serge ramelli's tutorials on youtube. Useful when you are starting out, especially in adding 'drama', but found it a little too strong for my taste :bsmilie:
For the HDR part, I do manual blending so basically I brush in the different exposures for different part of the scene. Sometimes I use luminosity masks for the highlights of buildings especially at night. Just google 'luminosity masks' for a better and more detailed explanation.
For colours I don't usually touch the saturation slider in lr unless it's to desaturate, and at most only the vibrance slider up to +15. Clarity +10 is usually the most I'll go though nowadays I often go the other way to clarity -5. A large part of the colours you can get should actually be attributed to the WB. If you managed to get the correct WB, colours-wise the photo should be pretty nice already. But don't be restricted by having a neutral grey point. As you can probably tell I tend to add quite a bit of magenta in my photos so feel free to play around with the WB.
Still have yet to catch up to many others in the forum in skill, but hope I've been able to address your queries!
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