The Rock House - Hocking Hills

Several years ago, I payed a visit to Hocking Hills, a wonderful area close to Columbus, Ohio and about a four hour drive from my home. It was a really great few days photographing with several of my friends, and over the last few years have posted several images taken there on this blog. However, making photographs in the Rock House, which is a cave that had been used by native Americans many years ago,  was very difficult because of the extraordinary dynamic range related to various openings letting the light in. I had tried processing the photo in the past by blending seven exposures using various HDR software brands as well as 'Merge To HDR' in Lightroom, but was never happy with the result because somehow the color just always seemed wrong.

I recently gave SNS-HDR a try, as there was a Black Friday sale for $18 and I had read comments in various forums that it gave natural looking results. Although there is still a bit of an 'HDR look" (which, frankly, I ended up intensifying a bit in further processing by adding contrast) it left the color very natural looking and requiring only a few tweaks in Photoshop to get it to look the way I remembered it. Overall, I like the result and am pleased with the intuitive SNS interface.

Rock House - Hocking Hills    © Howard Grill

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