As with Arrested Decay, this is an HDR shot taking advantage of the textures inherent in the abandoned buildings of the ghost town of Bodie.

Usually, when I get into complicated post-processing it is an issue of trial and error, with backtracking and improvisation until I find the right approach. In this case I was a little more organized.

Using Arrested Decay as the template, I created a flow chart showing the approximately thirty different basic processing techniques I used. These included running six exposures through Nik Merge to HDR Efex Pro, running three captures through the same software, two different Nik presets, a custom Nik preset, my own RAW processing, my own hand-HDR blending, Nik filters, Topaz filters, Photoshop filters, a pixelBender filter, and LAB adjustments.

If all this sounds time consuming and complex, of course it was. But for me the good news is that the process—and look I obtained—is repeatable with any set of images shot for HDR. Which means that, unlike the interiors at Bodie, the effort I put into processing this image is not gone with the wind.