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Dolphingod

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I had a quick question for all you HDR experts. Although I have only dabbled with HDR I have never had much success with it using CS3 -

What I don't understand is that if you are taking lets say 4 photos for an HDR composition and you are exposing for the dark foreground and bright sky etc...usually you will be blowing out the sky when exposing for the dark areas...this to me seems odd when then trying to create an HD as the photos which have blown out highlights give a really bad effect in the final HDR image?

Am I missing something...should you only be exposing for the dark bits to the extent you can without blowing the highlights?

Any help would be appreciated - it's been bugging me for ages!

Also I would appreciate if someone could show me an HDR example in photoshop which they have had some success with...or whether people think that there are better plug ins for this...

Thanks!

http://homepage.mac.com/dolphingod/tom/tom/
 
Dolphingod said:
Am I missing something...should you only be exposing for the dark
bits to the extent you can without blowing the highlights?
Click to expand...
no, just take bracketted shots +- 1 or 2 stops (3 or 5 is fine) and the software figures out which is the over and which is underexposed, dropping the end it doesn't need and then scaling back so it is a common exposure (ie adds 1 stop to the 1 stop underexposed, etc.).

The software looks for noise and other stress and discards that information.

Try it, it works in most cases. Won't work in some, light taking pictures of night sky as it gets confused with stars ...
 
easiest way to think of it:

when you do HDR you take a load of pictures of the same scene, and expose for different parts of the scene

in photoshop, you then keep the parts you want, and the parts you don't are discarded

it's basically akin to masking. you take a bunch of photos, mask out the bits you don't want (blown highlights, lack of shadow detail) and paint in the bits you do want

it really isn't any more complicated than that

what everyone doesn't realise is that 9 times out of 10, the HDR image is either:

a) very unnatural to the eye

b) compensating for not being able to expose properly in the first place

look at this link for example on wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging#Gallery

this photo looks absolutely ridiculous - this is clearly not a realistic scene



the ones in, say, fred mirandas gallery are more realistic

the trick is to try and maintain control over it. if you shoot a bunch of images - say for arguments sake 10 images each 1 stop apart, you're likely to have a massive dynamic range

then pile them up in photoshop and mask in the bits you want, and mask out the ones you don't

then play with opacity a bit on the mask and you can get a really natural-looking effect

however if you tried to automate it, the program may make a pigs ear of the whole thing and you get something that looks like a cartoon and is totally unnatural to the eye

--
-----
Neil C
http://www.homelands.me.uk/gallery/
 
I'm using photomatix and trying for a realistic feel.
Masking 10 images is a lot of work.
I mostly generate 3 jpegs, a stop apart from a single RAW image.
Here's a few examples.







cheers
Bill

Gotta believe in something....believe I'll take another photo...

http://www.pbase.com/billrobinson
 
Hi Dolphingod!

With HDR I'm very careful, since it is quite easy to get completely unnatural look. That by itself does not mean that these type of images are esthetically non appealing, it depends what are you trying to achieve. I do a lot of architectural photography and recently I have stared to produce HDR. I usually take 5 photos (EV: -2, -1, 0, 1, 2) and then produce one out of them. You have to be very careful with parameters, and afterwards with additional adjustments I produce final image. Most of the time I adjust Shadows/Highlight, Curves, ... One of the images produced this way is this one:



Lot more you can find in:

1. http://kordics.zenfolio.com/p676968734
2. http://kordics.zenfolio.com/p181010205

All photos in these two galleries, which have no EXIF info are HDR.

Tanti saluti,
Stevan Kordic
http://www.kordic.info
 
Bill Robinson said:
I mostly generate 3 jpegs, a stop apart from a single RAW image.
Click to expand...
I continue to read from people doing this (3 jpegs from a single RAW), however, I don't get it ;) Since the information is in this 1 raw file anyway, you can get this information into your final jpeg using the raw converter accordingly, e.g. use highlight recovery together with tone curves.

Would you mind to share your RAW file for this one (if not publicly then via pm ?) and I try and give it a go with 1 single development. I am happy to share my experience. I try to match your photo you generated with Photomatix. Would be interesting.

Thank you,
Markus
 
photomarkus said:
Bill Robinson said:
I mostly generate 3 jpegs, a stop apart from a single RAW image.
Click to expand...
I continue to read from people doing this (3 jpegs from a single
RAW), however, I don't get it ;)
Click to expand...
Learn how to use "layer masks." If you know how to do that, it's no mystery.
photomarkus said:
Since the information is in this 1
raw file anyway, you can get this information into your final jpeg
using the raw converter accordingly, e.g. use highlight recovery
together with tone curves.
Click to expand...
Yes, but it won't look as good. It will end up looking weird, like a bad HDR.

--
David Hill
http://www.davidhillphoto.com
Austin, Texas
 
There are at least 3 ways to do HDR's. One is the real one, using either Photoshop or Photomatix and generating a high resolution shot and then tone mapping it down to make it usable and even visible on a screen. The second simply blending intelligently shots together using various solutions among which a little gem called Tufuse (tabaware.com) a Dos program rather old looking but simply brillant.

Any solution needs to be used very carefully as expanding the dynamic can be quickly unnatural looking as other have wrote on this very thread.

A last point. If you can expose for shadows and highlights do it. I usually shoot from minus 3 to plus 2 Ev, thus 6 shots, but if you can't (IE wind in the trees, clouds passing too quickly) just shoot one RAW underesposing 1 stop and then "develop" it from -3 to +3. I do use Raw Shooter and can get with a 5D a lot of available info. Then use any solution to merge and get in a single shot as much dynamic as possible.

A couple of examples







This is a simple example of the original shot and below the Photomatix HDR version. I did use the second as the weather was really as bad and I needed to show it. No way with a single exposure version.





And some Tufuse examples





A last word. Shooting RAW, I I have had the chance to save a lot of shots and did improve many others just blending or HDRring multiple exposures. A big drawback, the noise. Photomatix push it a lot, at least the Versions 2, I did not tried the newest one. Try to always shoot at the lowest ISO if possible.

If I can help, drop me a mail, same if you want a RAW file or a larger version of a shot

--
Ludo from Paris
Tankers of tools, thimbles of talent
BestOf http://ludo.smugmug.com/gallery/1158249
 
photomarkus said:
Have you played with blending of your images instead of generating an
HDR ?
Click to expand...
To be honest I haven't been playing with blending for a while.
photomarkus said:
This are often more natural looking...
Click to expand...
I agree with you. Well executed blending will produce a more natural looking image. On the other hand it's more time consuming to produce such a image compared to the HDR.

Saluti,
Stevan Kordic
http://www.kordic.info
 
Blending images with tufuse takes only seconds, well, it depends on the processor inside your PC, but with a quad core Intel, 7 JPEGs are blended automatically and beautifully in less than a minute. Add a second minute to do a couple of adjustments in Photoshop and you're done.

--
Ludo from Paris
Tankers of tools, thimbles of talent
BestOf http://ludo.smugmug.com/gallery/1158249
 
Ludovic Monchat said:
Blending images with tufuse takes only seconds, well, it depends on
the processor inside your PC, but with a quad core Intel, 7 JPEGs are
blended automatically and beautifully in less than a minute. Add a
second minute to do a couple of adjustments in Photoshop and you're
done.
Click to expand...
A nice commercial (?!) tool that combines image aligning with the fuse algorithm is called "Bracketeer", working also on a Mac. So far I have only used their demo and tempted to buy it and prefer it over Photomatix, although 30$ for a simple GUI is a bit on the edge; on the other hand, it makes the job much easier compared to using the underlying command line tools.

My £0.02 ;)
 
But I will give it a try for sure, the main advantage of Tufuse is that it's for free and the output is rather convincing. I would be that 7 blends on 10 looks good while Photomatix average at least to me, never surpasses 3 to 4 and sometimes fails.

I know it's a Dos application but you just have to put all of your files in the same folder along with the exe and then invoke it just typing the name of the soft and an .jpeg for all the images. A couple of additional commands halp modifying some parameters. I'm not pro and don't program AT ALL but frankly, it's easy

--
Ludo from Paris
Tankers of tools, thimbles of talent
BestOf http://ludo.smugmug.com/gallery/1158249
 
Very good pictures!
 
kordics said:
Hi Dolphingod!

With HDR I'm very careful, since it is quite easy to get completely
unnatural look. That by itself does not mean that these type of
images are esthetically non appealing, it depends what are you trying
Click to expand...
That is true. Quite often people say that Hdr must be natural. I dont think so either. All they have have to do, is please the watchers eye.

Documenting something may be different, but even then a dark picture from a (say) dim church is not so helpfull or a good document.
 
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