Many of us who have wound up in photography wish we could be artists. And while automated computer tools will hopefully never be a substitute for human talent each year there are some new, cool processing options for our digital images which add artistic effects. This year’s leading contender in my book is the new HDR Toning filter in Adobe Photoshop CS5…

The filter not only does what you might expect, which is to allow you to give those over the top vibrant colors to a single image, but can be used to create other artistic effects in both color and monochrome. During a lunch break on our Rio Grande Valley Texas photo safari last month I took this fairly ordinary shot of a row of Harley Davidson motorcycles at a local bike rally:

All the people clutter up the scene and the real “bones” of the Harleys are lost. Experimenting with the HDR Toning filter I first tried the default conversion, which didn’t do much. The Photorealistic with the default settings helped give the image that “HDR look” (not always a good thing) but didn’t make me any happier with it:

Since one way to bring out structure in an image is to take away the color and work only with texture I tried the default monochrome option in the HDR Toning filter. It really started to help isolate the bikes:

But I wanted to push things a little further and make the image more abstract. It was a simple matter to instead switch to the High Contrast version of the Monochrome settings and instantly have a dramatic High-Key image:

There are quite a few other presets available for the HDR Toning filter and a nearly endless number of sliders and tweaks you can use on the dialog. There are even several different options for the process used to filter the image, with Local Adaptation being the one you’ll want to use for fun and artistic effects:

Note that this command is pretty much independent from the “Merge to HDR Pro” command which allows you to create an HDR image from a series of exposures—prior to any type of toning.

Another more traditional use of the HDR Toning filter is as a sort of super Shadow/Highlight Adjustment. I used it to work on this image of a Summer Tanager which despite the great pose of the bird had terrible back lighting:

Using HDR Toning (and some serious Healing Brush work) I turned the image into the much more interesting:

It’d never pass for an “original” and I wouldn’t submit it for stock or to a magazine, but at least I have a nice “art print” of a hard to find and photograph songbird created from a fairly mediocre original.

The only big drawback to the HDR Toning filter is that it insists you flatten your image when you use it. This makes it inordinately difficult to have a “base” layer with your unmodified image and a set of layers with various effects on top of it. I’m sure there are good technical reasons for the limitation but it’d be great if Adobe can remove it at some point.

So give the HDR Toning Image Adjustment command in Photoshop CS5 as your creativity is the only limit to the tinkering you can do with it. Let us know your results and any new techniques you come up with either by commenting here or in our forums on nikondigital.org. –David