HDR? Not Really

The image below was taken in Dublin California in the hills looking east toward Livermore, CA. My experience with night shooting is still very limited, but I enjoy trying post processing techniques to improve the image.

This is the RAW original …

In my first attempt, I merely added some brightening and reduced contract and saved the file....

For my 2nd attempt, my original idea was to take the RAW image into PSP and make three copies of it at different exposure levels, save them as JPEGs and then combine them into an HDR image (this is a common practice among current photographers when getting three images was not done at the site). What I ended up doing was something completely different. See if you like it....

The original RAW was taken into Photoshop and two copies were produced….

 In this first copy, I reduced the contrast and increased the lighting in the “shadows” (dark areas). A TIFF copy of it was saved …

However, that image had too much red (brown) in the image. So, opening the RAW again, I changed the “temperature” (aka hue) of the image so that it looked liked this …

Even though this is obviously too “cool,” (cold, with too much blue), I expected this result. A TIFF was saved of this image.

Then I opened Paint Shop Pro and selected the option to import the two TIFF files as HDR source images. The recommended brightness was far too extreme. So I lowered the overall brightness and ended up with the following image….

I don’t know that I am really completely satisfied with the results. I think I may have still left the image too bright. But it does demonstrate a technique that I have not previously found mentioned on the web. Those with more experience may be able to improve on the idea.