HDR panorama, comment please

What do you think about this picture ?

It's a panorama obtained stitching 3 hdr pictures.

I took 3 bracketed exposures of each of the 3 components of this image. Realized the 3 hdr first and then stiched them together.

Do you like the results ? Are there any technical errors ?

With cars all around ghosting is a mess to correct bot in hdr and in panorama. Some ghosts still visible, especially in the low left corner.

I'm not yet totally satisfied with the result but this is what I've obtained. I would really like to hear your comments.

Thank you.
Andrea

Nothing really interesting about this shot. Maybe if someone was standing on their head in the middle of the median or a ballet dancer doing a pirouette, it would make it interesting, otherwise kind of boring. HDR with boring photos is still boring.

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paul v

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I tend to agree with the fact that this photo is only a panorama of a city street, and thus not totally interesting if you have no interest in the view of the street....but one question arises to me:

how do you take an HDR of somebody dancing ? You need at least 3 exposures...it will be a mess...the subject will move while you shoot?

Think this is when a "stronger" HDR effect is needed, such as:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/97097494@N00/5464

Wow !

I always try to make them realistic, but I'll give the strong effects a try, thank you !

I really like this and think it would look great printed really large.

I see a busy street that for some reason doesn't look busy. Then it makes you look around the picture for something happening.....

Job done, if a photograph holds your attention for more than 5 seconds I think it's a great photo for that reason alone.

Maybe fix the car on the left?

James.

There's ghosting on the moving car to the left and you can see the differences in exposure between the middle frame and frame to the right. You can see the vertical seam along the right building.

Shooting Raw with Manual exposure would give you evenly exposed frames and more control with adjusting the shadows and/or highlights.

Some of my HDR here: http://dezsantana.com/hdr
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Dez

http://dezsantana.com

I think the scene is boring itself. It's not really a panorama, maybe it's too narrow to make proper panorama effect. The same is for HDR, it's just unnoticeable.

So even it was probably hard to do it technically (remove moving objects, compose panorama, create HDR), but result isn't that impressive.
That's my opinion
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mromka

Try Autopano Pro, it will stitch and produce three or more HDR layers with minimum ghosting, then your HDR program. Olonoeo does really good ghost removal and it's free for the moment:

http://www.oloneo.com/

DezM said:

There's ghosting on the moving car to the left and you can see the differences in exposure between the middle frame and frame to the right. You can see the vertical seam along the right building.

Shooting Raw with Manual exposure would give you evenly exposed frames and more control with adjusting the shadows and/or highlights.

Some of my HDR here: http://dezsantana.com/hdr
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Dez

http://dezsantana.com

Click to expand...

Your HDR are stunning, I whish I could take so beautiful pictures !

There is one thing I'm still trying to properly understand when shooting for HDR:

1. I set everything to manual, nothing automatic

2. Then I choose the f number (usually f/8 or f/11 )

3. I put the camera in aperture mode, set the metering mode to entire scene to get an idea of which kind of exposure time I would get IF taking a normal picture.

4. Switch the meter to spot, the camera still in aperture mode, and meter some areas in the left, in the center and in the right of the scene. I made a mean of these times to see what kind of exposure I get and compare it with exposure in n.3 to see how far or near I am to what the camera would have choosed.

I think the compairison with n.3 is redundant but I'm still learning and this helps me think twice if I am very very far from what camera said in n.3

4. Once I decided the time of exposure i switch the camera in manual mode, set exposure time according to the choice in n.3 and begin shooting in bracketing mode with + - 2 ev. (camera on tripod, but I don't have a panoramic head, so I try to correct rotating the tripod "around" the lens axis instead of rotating the head, which would give me more parallax error, I hope I used the right term in english!)

Is this correct or am I missing something / doing something wrong ?

I do shoot raw, but then again I do make very little corrections to the raw files to mantain them in sync with each other, usually I just let the program correct lens distortion and that's it.

Thanks a lot for your comments !

Reilly Diefenbach said:

Try Autopano Pro, it will stitch and produce three or more HDR layers with minimum ghosting, then your HDR program. Olonoeo does really good ghost removal and it's free for the moment:

http://www.oloneo.com/

Click to expand...

Thanks, I'll give Oloneo a try. I'm still on my old 2007 macbook pro (no mac version of Oloneo) but I'm switching to vaio with premium matte display / Win7 next month and I'll happily try it, looks like good software !

Your scene is too vast for spot metering. Spot will measure a small area of the center of your frame. If you point at something black, the meter will think it needs more exposure and may overexposed the scene. Same with white. The cameras meter will think the scene is too bright and underexposed the frame.

Instead, use Center Weighted or Matrix to get an average reading. Than set the camera to Manual so that the frames are all exposed the same. This is for panoramas.

As for hdr with auto bracket, the camera will compensate EV up and down. Not sure what camera you're using so I don't know how many frames you can bracket and at what exposure compensation. My guess is 3 bracketed frames?

Not on my PC now but do a DPR search for my posts with HDR & panorama in the D300 forum for tips.
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Dez

http://dezsantana.com

Thank you, I'll look for your post !

As a fellow beginner HDR'r (if that's even a proper term), using a d90 or d7000, I put the camera in continuous low release mode, hit the bracket button, change the exposures to 3 using a + / - 2.0 stop difference and then hold the trigger down until the 3 exposures have been taken. I will also then adjust the + / - 2.0 to other values and take other sets of 3. When I get home, I process the sets of 3 using Photomatix. Below you'll find a link to a few of my shots. Some of it isn't so good, but I'm quite proud of one or two of the shots. As I said, I'm a beginner too.

I think that it's ok that you're going for the realism effect. I also think that you could be a little more extreme with your treatment of the photos. It doesn't have to be a super wild HDR, you can use the technique to simply bring out the highlights and shadows if you do it correctly, thus accentuating reality so that people notice details that were previously hidden. I don't think that aspect shows in your image. Also, by using the auto-bracket function with the continuous low or high release mode, you can reduce/eliminate some of the ghosting issues, as the camera will take the 3 exposures pretty quickly. If you time your first shot well, you may be able to avoid the inclusion of undesirable objects such as passing cars or fast moving people.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sgtsalamander/sets/72157626091612594/