So this is a shot back from when I was in New Mexico in January that never made it onto the blog back then.  But since I am getting ready to head that way again on my way to my buddy Jeff Lynch’s Texas Landscape Safari next week, I decided to go back through some images to see if there were places I wanted to go revisit.  I found this image in the archives and realized that I had done nothing with it at this point.  So I started playing around and decided on a solution to make a neat image.

So first off I decided to start this out as a 1 shot HDR editing the image in Photomatix 3.1, and got what you see below:

So it is overdriven and has some funky halos and blues going on not to mention a TON of noise that got introduced in the process.  So I went from here, convert the layer into a Smart Object and started the real work.

Step 1 was to drop the image in Nik’s Dfine 2.0 to axe the noise from the image.

Step 2 was to go into Nik’s Silver Efex Pro and finish the image how I wanted.  Up top is the final result.

Enjoy and have a great weekend.