Recently I have taken to “not” reviewing my images until Friday morning, when I would choose my photograph for the 2010 Deck collection on the main site.  But this week I broke from the norm to attempt another HDR (High Dynamic Range) image.  I went with Nikhil out to get his daily photograph, and we turned down the dividing road between the villages of Better Hope and Vryheid’s Lust, I wasn’t much inspired by the things I saw, but the sky was very nice, and I thought that a wide-angle HDR would turn out nicely.  I had also just downloaded my trial version of Nik HDR Efex Pro and I wanted to try it out.

I have blogged about how I normally process my HDR images before, so this post is more about showing the results of trying the new software from Nik.  I was impressed with the similarity it has to the other Nik software I’ve tried (like the Nik SIlver Efex) and it is easy and intuitive to use.  I did not try to learn too much on this first try, just played with the basic settings to see how it stacked up against Dynamic HDR from Mediachance.

I think the resulting image speaks for itself, both Nik HDR Efex Pro and Dynamic HDR were able to help me to portray the variety of tones that I saw, in this case I was facing the slate afternoon sun, so the image has a lot more detail than a standard shot of the sky which rendered the buildings in the foreground as mostly silhouettes.

Take a look and let me know what you think  🙂  If you click on the image the site has it a bit larger.