POD - Experimentation

In my first job out of college I worked for a printing company that ran huge rolls of paper through the presses. When the presses were cleaned up we ended up with paper streaked with diluted ink that created wonderful abstract images.  I've always been attracted to abstraction like this, or to the abstraction that comes from looking at just a small piece of a larger image.

We had a thunderstorm tonight around sunset that left behind some wonderful, billowing clouds in amazing shades from brilliant white to almost black. I found it interesting to look at just a piece of the larger scene.

I took a 3 image photo sequence and ran it through Photomatix Essentials, then did some post processing with GIMP. Here's how it came out.

This is the unmanipulated base photo. In person the scene looked much more dramatic than this.

My first outcome from Photomatix Essentials. It certainly makes it much more dramatic, but perhaps almost too dramatic.

This one was processed through Photomatix Essentials with the "Natural" preset, which brings in the shadows from one photo and the highlights from another photo to combine them with the base image of my first photo. After some adjustment of the levels with GIMP, this is the result. It's much more natural looking and in fact looks much more like the actual scene.