First decent T2 image - classical sunset

[Ladana]

My first T2 picture that came out somehow decent. A classical sunset scene:

[old_blaggard]

Wow, that's fantastic work for a first image! If you want to work on it more I would recommend tweaking the vegetation distribution and variety to make it look more realistic. Great start, though - I look forward to seeing where you go from here .

[gregsandor]

Nice, has a magical quality to it.  Where is it?  What lives there?

[Saurav]

Great results for a first public image, the sky and the lighting particularly. Agree with o_b foreground could use more variation and randomness. The other thing I noticed is the background mountains look a bit plain, bit more surfacing work would help here. But lighting, composition and sky are fantastic as is. Congrats on a very fine first showing.

[Kadri]

It is a good image in itself , not only as a first , Ladana  

For me only the lower right shore needs work ; it looks a little to polygonal .

[domdib]

Very nice image - would agree with most of the suggestions for (minor) improvement. I really like the clouds, and in particular the cirrus - would you consider sharing this as a clip file?

[Ladana]

Thank you for all the nice comments and suggestions.
Regarding the clouds I might add, that they look in fact bland in the original image, and are nothing exciting (as far as the setup in Terragen goes).
I am an avid fan of HDR photography and my interest in Terragen mainly came from not being able to travel much at the moment and rather use Terragen to create my HDR sources. After the first test with the .raw image that Terragen puts into the temp folders didn't work too well, I set up an animation of 5 frames, and keyed the exposure of the camera to 0.0625, 0.25, 1, 4 and 16 (multiples of 4, to get something similar to an EV-spacing of 4). I then used photomatix pro to combine all the 5 renders into a HDR image, and then remapped it to the desired effect.

As you can see, the sky is not too exciting, but the HDR remap works amazingly well on pictures created with Terragen.

[Kadri]

...After the first test with the .raw image that Terragen puts into the temp folders didn't work too well, I set up an animation of 5 frames, and keyed the exposure of the camera to 0.0625, 0.25, 1, 4 and 16 (multiples of 4, to get something similar to an EV-spacing of 4). I then used photomatix pro to combine all the 5 renders into a HDR image, and then remapped it to the desired effect.
As you can see, the sky is not too exciting, but the HDR remap works amazingly well on pictures created with Terragen.

Do you know that you can save your renders as EXR  files , Ladana ?

[cyphyr]

I was about to say it looked like an HDR image.
Very good:)
It would be interesting to see what the difference is between your method (more akin to the trad photographic method) and Terragen's .exr files.
Richard
Ps to save exr do your render as normal and when you save just select .exr from the file type menu. You can also save .exr image sequences in the sequance/output tab, simply change the default temp.%04d.bmp to temp.%04d.exr (change temp to your file name)

[Ladana]

The difference is actually marginal, quite subtle, yet distinct in the post. But that might also come from the way Photomatix treats the source images. When working on it in the post, I have more control over certain areas in regards to brightness manipulation, kind of (my English fails me here) better manipulation of larger areas with respect to light and dark. The processed .exr for example at the same setting I used for the combined image, showed more highlights on the ground in the lower right, which made it even less real. I will post the picture once I found it.

[Ladana]

I hope this image here does a better job than me trying to put it into words:

From left to right: 5 images combined into a HDR image; then the remapped .exr with the same settings as the first one and last a photoshop layer with the differences of the two (although a bit adjusted for better visibility).

I played around with the .exr again after I made the image below, but none of the settings available got me the same light effects or the brilliant sun than the combined images.

[inkydigit]

beautiful work!

[cyphyr]

Very interesting comparrison, thankyou I agree that the first method gives the best results in this case
Richard

[MacGyver]

Very good first image! I also like the lighting and the grass a lot

[FrankB]

I think you will get the same results with the exr, if you apply a tad additional contrast and move the mid point of the colors histogram a little to the right.