Michael Tuuk posted a photo:
An early morning photo of Bobby Labonte's race car at El Arroyo on 5th Street in Austin. Bobby's truck driver is in the background with the blue shirt.
This is a relatively standard 3-exposure HDR tonemapped in Photomatix. I attempted to keep that "sun just coming up" early morning feel to the shot and mainly used the tonemapping for texture and depth (I blended this with one of the original exposures at about 60% opacity).
Beyond that, I added one curves layer (slight S-curve for contrast) masked to hit almost the whole image. I added a second curves layer to beef up the contrast around the El Arroyo sign -- the sun flare was killing it. Finally, I added a saturation adjustment layer masked only to enhance the "El Arroyo" neon.
So...should I clone/heal out that spot reflection in the '7'? I initially decided not to but it's frankly driving me nuts.
Hmm, I'm getting hungry for some TexMex...
