Aftermath

An experiment of layering three different exposures, one in black and white, to create a much more textured image...

Update:

I decided to work on this as one of five still lifes that I have to come up with for a photography course. I was looking for something different from the usual mundane wine bottle and glasses. So, I went in close filling the frame with the glasses and the bottom part of the bottle. I cropped out the elipses at the top of the glasses becasue they were mirroring the bases of each glass and just did not look right, and I think this has tightened up the composition just about as far as it could be. I have to say it was not easy to get precisely the same crop on all three shots, in the end I had to layer them all into one file and crop them together.

Next it was a matter of temporarily discarding the Black and White layer, getting the colour and saturation of the underexposed and over exposed layers right and blending and merging them to create the colour layer of the image. Then a goodly amount of noise reduction and sharpening to bring out the best of the clours and textures, before bringing back the monochrome layer over the top of everything, giving it a lot of contrast for shadow definition, and reducing the opacity to about 75% to let some of the colour from the underneath laye to come back through.

All in all I think a very satisfying result.