More HDR with CS5

I keep looking for excuses to keep messing Photoshop CS5's HDR toning tool.  Here's a photograph I took at the Gilmore Car Museum in Kalamazoo, Michigan.  The barns there were tough to photograph because they had so much natural light coming in through their windows and they didn't have any lights on.  Using flash was practically useless.  But I'm biased to using the flash anyway.  The photo on the left was the original and the right one was edited using CS5.  

I'll be adding these to the gallery soon.

Enjoy.
~Jonathon

Photoshop CS5's HDR Toning

Photoshop CS5 was released in April I believe.  Usually I don't like upgrading things on my computers because  because often times it breaks things, or plug-ins and other things aren't available right away for what you need to use. I was anxious to try this out because of the HDR Toning adjustment capability.  For those that don't know, HDR Photography (High Dynamic Range) is a method that's used to bring out other tones and variations in the image that are captured by the camera, but not necessarily brought out correcly at the time of exposure.  There's a long winded explanation behind the 'actual' process of shooting this way and editing it later.  But, the bottom line is, is that now there's a 'backyard' way to do this in the latest version of Photoshop that I think is pretty damn cool.  Tutorials on how to do this and which settings to use are starting to pop up all over the net, so I'm not going to waste time with that.  What I can do is show you what I did in less than a few minutes of editing.

The photo to the left is the familiar shot I had of a train engine. Nothing wrong with photo in particular.  The one next to it was adjusted using the HDR Toning adjustment.  It makes the highlights brighter, the shadows darker, and detail more readily seen.  It's a more vibrant photograph.

It's fun to play with the settings and see what you can come up with.  I'm sure I'll be messing around with it more in the future.