Result of merging and mapping the project shown in Explorer

I am thrilled with this result and cannot wait to get to work on it with the full version of Machinery. It looks a lot better on my monitor than it does here. I do have some other stuff here in other albums of comparable pictorial quality but here are several points I need to add.

In the first place, with my previous software, this shot was one of my rejects because of ghosting with a set of handheld exposures and none was good enough to use on its own, so I am lucky I kept the files instead of binning them. I already have found a lot of stuff that before I came across Machinery appeared to be useless, but now I know that with many of them that is anything but the case. That is because I now can use all the exposures in my bracketed sets since ghosting no longer is a problem and the tone mapping is excellent, sometimes better than that!

So now I will have to go through all my digital images again. That is the bad news but the good news is that Machinery is very quick and easy to use and, given that already I have other failures that suddenly have turned into successes, I have no doubt that it is well worth the effort.

When I went to the South Western USA for 24 days in 2011, I was amazed how many successful shots I had and how few rejects. The same was true when I went to Slovenia the following year. However, it now seems that the proportions are going to turn out to be significantly better as now all my handheld bracketed sets are perfectly usable instead of only single exposures. But that is not all.

For my work, I do not find that an HDR developer is enough. I usually want to tweak beyond the easy and the obvious. In most cases I also want to do some work on areas of the image selectively so, for that, I always go into Photoshop. In many cases with my landscapes, I find a huge improvement can be made with the skies. I often replace them and even synthesise my own by using the patch tool to improve upon the sky in a picture or from another frame I have used for that purpose. The more I have done it over the last few years, the easier it gets and the better I am at doing it. A great sky in a landscape can turn a mediocre picture into a masterpiece, just like hair can become a woman's crowning glory!

The bottom line in all the remaining shots shown below, some of which I have worked at before with other HDR software, but they were often a lot of work even to get to the stage I have reached with these unfinished efforts here just to see what Machinery can do. Before many were a huge amount of effort and all too often part way on the road to failure before giving up!

Not so any more and only a few minutes spent on each!

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