Lake Wakatipu New Zealand

Photos at Lake Wakatipu, New Zealand

Last month I was on a business trip to New Zealand, and while I was laid out sick most of the trip, I did get out for some photos. I went for a drive through the countryside outside Queenstown with a couple of colleagues from work and stopped at Lake Wakatipu in Glenorchy on the South Island. I have a bunch of other shots from that drive, and need to sift through them when I get some downtime.

[envira-gallery-dynamic id=”tags-post2147″]

These were both edited in AuroraHDR 2017 and On1 Photo. I just upgraded to the new version of AuroraHDR and it is a quantum leap from the original release – faster, less memory hogging, and cleaner output.

A couple of people have asked me about how I edit my images, so I’ll try to give a high level walk through, but I haven’t really nailed down a specific workflow yet…

Abandon ye all hope who enter here …

So, the one thing that is the same is that I use Lightroom to manage, store and catalog my photos. I will copy the images to my hard drive, import them into LR and do a few cleanup / housekeeping tasks (camera/lens calibration, clean up dust spots, fix metadata, etc.). Then if I am working on a multiple exposure HDR such as these, I export the exposures from LR to Aurora (as .tiff images with LR changes). I don’t use many of the presets in Aurora, rather I play with the sliders till I get a look I like. I know … I know … I need to find a way to speed this part up.

Once I am done in Aurora and save the resulting image back to LR, or if it’s not a HDR image, I will open the image up in On1 for a few typical tweaks – Dynamic Contrast, Polarizer (if needed), some adjustment brush tweaks and vignetting. VIOLA! You now know as much, if not more, than I do about my workflow. It is more art than science at the moment (no pun intended).

Wrapping it up in a bow …

One of these days, I plan to document the process and maybe even record a tutorial, but I am still tweaking things and I don’t think I’m ready for Prime Time just quite yet … Right now I am chomping at the bit for the new release of On1 RAW – this should simplify things a bit if I no longer need Lightroom …

By the way, if you are looking for a tutorial and training on Lightroom, Matt Kloskowski has a great The Ultimate Lightroom Course which I have purchased and is really damn good!

Photo Location (Lake Wakatipu):

[wp_mapit]