For those of you that are familiar with our HDR Collaborations, we welcome you to another round.  This time, a set of brackets from the Lansdowne Theater. I struggled with them personally because of the white balance obstacles.  I finally worked through them with inspiration knowing the group would be pounding these brackets as well!  Without delay here are the groups renditions!  Thanks!

What a great set Scott, I was pleasantly surprised when I opened up the brackets, what a great scene. Scott warned us of the White Balance issue, but that was no big deal to correct. I immediately knew what I wanted to do with scene upon seeing the first bracket. I processed the scene in Photomatix Pro first then started playing around with NIK using some midnight and fog filters. I wanted to make the projector come alive again. I finished it off with some OnOne Tweaks and some sharpening. I was happy with my results in the end, what a fun set Scott, thanks for hosting.

What a cool set of brackets Scott Frederick! Love pixel pushing frames from locations I will likely not get to see otherwise – very cool – Thanks Scott! Scott gave us a head’s up on a potential white balance issue with the light coming in form outside the room, but as soon as I looked over the image, I knew it would not be a problem because color was not going to play a major role. All I saw was a vintage style image like I’ve seen in industrial plants from back in the day! To get there, I applied the Fade to BW preset in Perfect Effects and lowered the opacity a bit so that only a hint of color was left. A crop seemed to be necessary to get the projector and the chair out of the middle of the frame, but couldn’t find one that suited me, so I applied a Focal Point bug to the image where the center was all that was in focus and really liked the effect, especially with a darker vignette applied. A slight dodging of the control panel in the back was all that was left. Great set Scott and a ton of fun to work on!

Mark Garbowski

Scott does an amazing job of finding, accessing, and sharing great locations with us. This scene has a 50s sci-fi look to me, which somehow inspired me to go in the direction of more modern dystopian future sic-fi in my treatment. I misplaced my notes of what I did, so I cannot go into much detail, but I know it involved the OnOne Perfect Photo Suite, and a texture of some kind

Bob Lussier

Thanks Scott! Since starting this HDR Collaboration we’ve all been able to “visit” some pretty cool places through each other’s images. Of all of them, this is my favorite. What a cool location and what a great shot. After running the brackets through Photomatix, I brought the image into Photoshop CS6 beta. I applied several curve layers. One for global contrast, one for selective contrast and another for selective contrast. I added an additional curve to adjust the color balance. It was finished in Lightroom.

Silent G
Rob Hanson

Scott, I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed working on this set of brackets, so thanks for sharing them with us.

There were so many elements that could be drawn out, it was at first difficult to figure out which ones I wanted to highlight, or even the overall look that I wanted. I soon discovered that I wanted it to look as though it was a three-dimensional, modern-day CGI sort of scene, while still maintaining a sense of the old days of cinema projectors and theaters. A few versions and about 30 layers later… this is what I came up with for you.

One lighting effect I wanted to achieve is that the door of the projector room had just been thrown open during the movie. By highlighting the back of the projectors, darkening the left side, and strengthening the incoming beam of light and the theater below, I think it makes it look as though the film has been interrupted by someone walking into the room.

Whenever I process a bracket set like this, I’m amazed at the details that can be revealed… the machinery, the little knobs, dials, and switches, the curtains in the theater, and the antique emblems and labels. It really takes us back to another time, and scenes like this make it seem like those details are frozen in time.

This was one incredible scene to work with. I only hope I’ve done it some justice.