   Anyone good with Photoshop?
  I've always been curious how people took an ordinary picture, messed with it in Photoshop and made it look vivid.  Here's a pic from my trip to California Hot Springs a few weekends back.  (This isn't the actual hot springs but about a half mile down.)Can someone please edit this to make it more like what you see in wallpapers.  But more than that, can you please let me know the steps in Photoshop.  I take it that this needs to be somehow saturated and adjusted for contrast but I really know little about this.  Though it wouldn't surprise me if there was a Make Image Look Pretty filter I overlooked.(As an afterthought I Googled for this but didn't find anything good.)   
  those are usualy done with multiple exposures. You can also create HDR effects but you need multiple exposures at different exposure settings to get a good range of light.Some info on HDR images.;Here are some examples of what you can expect from HDR images.;  A bloom filter might make it look "better". Depends on what you really want. To make bloom, copy the image to a new layer. Then blur the layer with gaussian blur so that it's not too blurry but not too sharp either. Select layer style as "screen". Then adjust brightness and contrast until you're happy. Increasing saturation (on the bottom/background layer) could also help.   ;  Not sure exactly what you are looking for but here is your photo I cleaned up a bit. I purposefully increased the intensity of the colors to give it a more lush feel. Not great but not bad for 2 minutes work. Your photo. Here is just a little adjustment of colors / hues / sharpness. ;;Quote:Original post by tstrimpHere are some examples of what you can expect from HDR images.Those look terrible.  Are they photographs?  They look CG.   ;Quote:Original post by owl2nd picpretty cool but the middle dark stripe looks a bit fakey   ;Quote:Original post by WitchcravenThose look terrible.  Are they photographs?  They look CG.I kind of like the effect. some more  Some of those are much better and some look like paintings.And aparently some people  agree with you.   ;  This is what I did in a few minutes:The problem with the image is that there's just not enough data at the darkest and lightest points, so the contrast is going to be too high no matter what is done to it.I sharpened it a bit, applied a bloom (a bit too much, I think, but saved it and lost my undo history and I didn't want to do the whole thing over again), and then played with curves.  Curves is really the only way to fix the lighting in an image, and it takes quite some time to get good at it.  There's just no way for the computer to automatically fix it.  I also turned the saturation up very slightly.  Things not to do are to shift the hue overall and overdo anything.  IronGryphon's, for example, looks very vibrant, but it's a perfect example of making an image look totally not natural.  Note the purple water and synthetic bluish green foliageEDIT:  Even mine doesn't look totally natural anymore, but I couldn't do much better.   