I took this shot while at Corona Del Mar beach in Laguna, CA. This beach is super rocky and real nice for some landscape photos. I have shot here before and got some great pictures so I wanted to go back and try again and it worked out great. Funny thing is that the pictures didn’t turn out nearly as good as I had wanted so I tried my hand at some photo manipulation. To make the finished copy I actually had three exposures shot at -2, 0, +2. I processed these into jpeg files and combined them in Photomatix into an HDR image. With the newly made HDR image, I brought it into Photoshop CS6. where I masked through the better parts of the RAW images to make the photo more pleasing. From there I ended up replacing the sky with another file that I had on standby for just that purpose because I knew if the sky had more of a red hue it would better suit the vision I had intended. It didn’t look quiet right since the water still didn’t have the reflection and tones of the new sky so I added the new sky layer again and flipped it vertically and set the appropriate blending mode. The rest of the post-processing included masking through certain areas and using basic Photoshop tools like levels and curves as well as Nik Color Efex Pro. Hope you like the end result. If you have any questions on the specifics of the process don’t be afraid to ask!
