Lord of the Rings?

[lrcphoto]

Watched the LOTR trilogy on dvd over the weekend. Took some GX100 shots today in nearby countryside. In PP suddenly thought it would be interesting to try and get the kind of saturated, diffuse, glowing, blown highlight look that LOTR was shot with. Here's my first efforts. Still need to work out how to control channel clipping in the highlights to avoid the slight colour cast in 3rd photo.
C+C welcome.
Regards, Roman

 

[odklizec]

Although I'm not a big fan of visible PP, I like these shots! Especially the last one. I can see it in a kids' book or maybe some sort of callendar? Nice work!

 

[Grus74]

Interresting results! Could you share some info about how one might get this kind of look?

 

[lrcphoto]

I'm still playing around with various techniques but this is the basic process:
- brighten up the midtones with a curves adjustment
- load the luminosity mask, create a new layer via copy, gaussian blur it 8 to 10 pixels
- create a curves adjustment layer, dont do anything with it, just change its blend mode to soft light
- create a hue/saturation adjustment layer - may want to desaturate the effect a bit
- play around with the various layers opacity from 70% to 100% and add a mask to be more selective
With white clouds you'll likely blow channels giving a colour cast in the clouds. Just have to do a selective colour adjustment on white to fix that.
I'm also playing around with the "blend if" layer options at the moment, but the above gets you there or thereabouts.

Regards, Roman