Fall color in Colorado was early this year – and it was spectacular! We drove to Crested Butte on Monday, September 24, and found the colors there at their peak. We also found rain and, while the moisture was badly needed, it made photography difficult. On Wednesday, we moved on to Ouray and headed up to Dallas Divide to meet Stan Burman for sunset. We arrived amid low clouds from the afternoon storms. Just as the sun was setting, some breaks appeared in the clouds and they lit up. This is my favorite from the series I shot that evening. Then, it was off to dinner at the True Grit in Ridgeway.

For those who like technical details, this is an HDR image. I merged 5 exposures (separated by 1 ev) to a 32-bit image in Photoshop’s HDR Pro. I then saved that image as a 32-bit tiff file and imported it back into Lightroom. I used Lightroom for most of the adjustments and then took the image back into Photoshop as a Smart Object for some finishing. This is a powerful technique that is rapidly becoming my go-to workflow for producing natural-looking HDR images.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2012 and is filed under Uncategorized. Both comments and pings are currently closed.