I was playing around with this picture one day, I added a vignette, I did my noise reduction, and then I duplicated it, and set the blend mode to soft light.  I would normally do that anyway before I High Pass sharpened it, but then I fell in love with the results of soft light.  So naturally I did it again, and thus came the birth of the Extreme Soft Light Technique.  This is the perfect example of what HDR can do to a normal everyday picture.  It also stresses the importance of post processing of your HDR images.  Just as a RAW file is a negative so are your tonemapped HDR images.  Check out the Before, HDR, and After Extreme Soft Light below.  If it interests you, you can move on to the tutorial!

 

Blake Rudis
f.64 Academy and f.64 Elite are the brainchildren of Blake Rudis. While he is a landscape photographer, he is most passionate about post-processing images in Photoshop and mentoring others.

For Blake, it's all about the art and process synergy. He dives deep into complex topics and makes them easy to understand through his outside-the-box thinking so that you can use these tricks in your workflow today!
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