Reflecting on the true colour of brass

  
I was contemplating what to enter in this week patch challenge, with the dual theme of Door/Door Knob and renewal, and I realised I had change the door knob on my studio to a lockable type. the contrast of the old worn paint and the bright shiny brass might make a nice simple story and photo. Metal surfaces, particularly when they are strongly reflective can be a challenge to get the right exposure so I had taken a bracketed set and kind of forgotten about it. I had used lightroom to expand the tone a little on the best exposure and shifted the clarity and vibrancy a little to the right but the brass was just a little to warm and the orange blown out. Other things took my attention and by the time I returned to decide whether to upload this, my photos had been auto-backed up and google+ had done its auto awesome thing again. I immediately spotted that the colours where truer (the door was open and the doorknob clearly in my view). So I immediately created a 16bit HDR image using picturenaut, and finished it in lightroom with much the same approach to the single image. The difference is a little astounding but I like it because to has treated the strong colours much more subtly and now looks exactly right in my view.