Many people are familiar with High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography. This chapter shows how you can take an eXtended Dynamic Range (XDR) image by extending the exposure range, and going even further to an ExDR image through the manipulation of the image structure, time, specific focus points, blur, and more .
Chapter Four, "The Unwitting Ally," shows how you can go beyond exposure and apply the concepts of Extended Dynamic Range (ExDR) photography to focus, blur, and image structure by image harvesting. You will create the picture that you saw in your unconscious mind rather than creating a historically accurate one. According to the author, this is where the real journey begins. You will be making modifications to direct the viewer's eye to where you want it to go and to what you want it to see. By understanding how to control color, you will gain mastery over the images that you create.
The book concludes with an afterword by a friend and mentor of Vincent Versace, Jay Maisel, who is very anti-Photoshop and anti-post-shot manipulation. Here we get the proverbial other side of the coin, as a balance of sorts is achieved in relation to Welcome to Oz' very pro-manipulation teaching position.
What I like about Welcome To OZ 2.0 is that in its rewrite, a lot of minor material was removed and more focus and time was put into these four chapters giving a much more thorough treatment to the topics at hand. What happened to the rest of the text? According to the author, there will be additional books coming out in the future that will contain some of that material as well as many more topics.
Instead of a DVD, the source files as well as trial plug-ins are available from a website for download. Since you will be working with these images and lots of layers, you will need a computer with a fast processor, plenty of ram and Welcome To Oz 2.0 has also been updated to work with the new features of Photoshop CS5. If you are looking for a challenge, and you want to take your Photoshop as well as your photographic skills to the next level, then I would very highly recommend Welcome To Oz.
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