What Anstruther lacked in snowfall it certainly made up for in choppy waters! We ventured onto the harbour walls making sure not to stray too far from the railings which would,  I’m sure, have saved us from certain death had the gale-force wind picked up any more. I do like to be dramatic. We noticed (it was hard not to) that the incoming waves were battering off one of the furthest out walls and were reaching an incredible height (look at the step ladder on the picture for a sense of scale). A great shot was right there to be snapped, I thought.

At the time when I was taking my shots, I wondered how well they’d actually come out – the sun was behind the clouds, the wall was quite dark against the white sky and there wasn’t much distinction between the crashing waves and the sky. I wondered if there could be anything which I could (easily) do in photoshop in the comfort (and warmth) of my own home.

Now for the tutorial part of the post. Well an introduction to the tutorial at least, for this isn’t supposed to be a step-by-step walk-through of how I processed the image. Why not? Three reasons: 1. I’ve not got time (poor excuse, I know), 2. I can’t remember all the steps and 3. I think it’s much more useful for tutorials to explain techniques but ultimately give the reader an idea to try out on their own photos. Too often you can try to execute a tutorial on one of your own images, for it not to work as well as the one used in the tutorial you’ve seen and for you to finish feeling disappointed. Different techniques work for different images and so long as you understand the basics of post processing and are able to identify what’s wrong with an image, then you should always be fine. The other element, though, is to realise when your photo is rubbish (which mine often are) and isn’t worth trying to salvage. I think my image here very nearly fell into that category.

As I didn’t have my tripod with me – and let’s be honest it wouldn’t have been much use in a wind that I could hardly stand up in – I couldn’t take (and then later merge together) multiple exposures to try and increase the dynamic range of the photo. Regardless of my tripod issues, the waves would have moved too much in between shots to allow multiple frames to be merged in photoshop. Instead I opened the RAW version of the photo in Nikon Capture (you can, of course, use whatever RAW conversion program you like) and made three separate exposures - one original without any exposure compensation and the others at +0.5 EV and -0.5 EV (see images below with related histograms). The benefits of shooting RAW are clear – you can recover a great amount of details in the shadows (i.e. the wall) and the highlights (i.e. the bright sky).

The next step was to open the three shots with Photomatix. I started to use this program to create HDR images a number of years ago and before photoshop added the feature but I like to stick with what I know so can’t tell you how the two programs compare. I’m sure that photoshop (and other programs) can create just as good tone mapped HDR images. I never use an HDR image as my base image (this should make more sense if you read further) so I don’t ever spend much time playing about with the settings on Photomatix. For the avoidance of any doubt, I really don’t like the images which come straight out of Photomatix – they look too fake and unnatural (in my humble opinion).

I then opened my original image in photoshop and added my newly created HDR image as a new layer. I set the blending mode of this new layer to ‘darken’ and immediately saw the improvements it made to the sky – it really helped to increase the contrast between the surf from the waves and the sky. (As the name suggests, if the blending mode of a layer is set to ‘darken’ only the parts of that layer which are darker than the underlying layer will show through). Not liking my photo to look too fake, I reduced the opacity of this layer and masked out any areas where I didn’t want the original image to be darkened.

I then repeated this process by adding the HDR image as another new layer but this time setting the blending mode to ‘lighten’. You can see how this gives you total control over how the HDR image impacts on your original image. In my opinion, this is HDR imaging at its best – you’re using the software here to increase the dynamic range (thus making it a High Dynamic Range image) rather than creating a completely new image.

Now obviously none of the above images look anything like the final shot but all that I did to the rest of the image was to add a variety of curves adjustment layers. The whole point of adding in the HDR layers was to add some contrast to the image in a way that I would have struggled to do so using adjustment layers alone. Oh, and I converted it to black & white of course!

The post processing on this image was fairly easy; a little time consuming if anything. What concerns me slightly about shots like this though is the massive difference between the original and the processed shot. It’s always best to get the shot right in camera - whether it’s nailing the exposure, composition and/or lighting. But there are times when all of these elements simply can’t come together in a shot. Looking at this particular shot we can see that the composition is ok (there’s not really much I could do with the scene), the exposure was as good as I could get it the circumstances but the third element – the lighting – simply wasn’t there. I’m pretty sure that had the sun been able to peek out from behind the clouds it would have illuminated the crashing waves and provided a nice natural contrast with the sky. But alas the weather gods weren’t on my side and I had to settle with this shot instead.

I’m pleased with the results here and don’t think I’ve ‘cheated’ too much. All I’ve really done is play about with the contrast – overall and local – of the shot. Hopefully I’ve been able to take a reasonably dull shot of a fairly spectacular scene (in real life at least) and made it a little more interesting.

P.S. I lost my favourite hat whilst taking this shot – the wind snatched it from my head and took it straight out to sea. I hope it was worth it!