Fall Frame - softly textured Vertorama / Fall Promo

Hello,
it is that time of the year again that I really love to capture.
I still have to wait for the right weather over here, but the forecast is very promising for the next days, so I better get my gear ready...

Going through my shots from last fall, my eyes fell on two shot. First I didn't realized that they had a lot of potential. These were ideal candidates for a moody and misty autumn vertorama.

A vertorama is a vertical panorama of two or more shots merged together in Photoshop or any other suitable software.  Have a closer look at this technique here:

Autumnly World Vertorama

First I'd like to show you the result of my work:

Please move over the picture to see the before/after

Preparing the files

I started out with two photos that I had to capture with different settings. 

I knew that I wanted to blend these two, but the problem was the dark foreground and the very bright sky with the sun about to come through the mist.

That meant I had to process them differently - I started with the bottom pic:

It was shot at 1/125 s Iso 200 and f 10

Apart from the tones I enhanced the foreground with a gradient filter and played around with the curves layer to get as much detail as possible without losing the misty softness. 

When I was satisfied it looked like that:

One can copy the processing of a picture and apply it on another shot in Lightroom, that's what I did with this, although I was sure that it wouldn't be perfect and that I had to correct at least the exposure.

The raw file looked like that:

It was shot at 1/400 s Iso 200 and f 10

I applied the settings of the first picture and had only adjust the light hoping that my corrections would be perfect for the merging.  I checked the histogram while doing the adjustments, but it only took a bit of playing around with the exposure setting to achieve a picture suitable for merging.

I skip the merging of the two pictures, because I covered this in a previous post that you can check out using the link I  posted at the beginning.

Textures

My goal was to keep as much of the atmosphere and tones as possible or even enhance the whole picture a bit by my choice of textures

Please take a look at the layers:

It took quite some time to find textures that added something interesting to this - Rose Mist was perfect, because it added a rough red frame to the sky - a perfect addition to the red bottom of the image. Worn Map brought a bit grunge and light to the dark tree leaves in the upper left corner of the picture. After adding the textures I only had to correct the red tones a bit and I was satisfied with the result.

Thanks for reading!

Fall Promo - save 15% on all texture packs

I am pleased to announce another promotion for the rest of this month.

Enter the coupon code

FALL2014 

at the check-out to save 15% on all texture packs !!

Start shopping here: Texture Packs

Have a great weekend!

Dirk