Before and after HDR

[ucci]

Taken with a 500mm Sigma lens, a 'straight shot' with some PP in PS and then three shots at -2, 0 and +2 which were processed in PS's Automated HDR system. Just for comparison to see the difference.

Thanks for viewing and for any comments you may care to post.
old ucci

[Mark von Kanel]

tghe crop looks bad to me, get rid of the stuff on the left, the truck looks a little over exposed, would be an interesting image with a little more work, theres lots of texture to work with, just need to think about it a bit more

mark

[Viana]

There is a small diff in the shots, but not much, at least on my monitor.

[ucci]

Hi Vianna
Thanks for comment and feed back which was most interesting. On my monitor the non-HDR shot is badly clipped at the the shadows and badly blown at the light end of the spectrum. Also the colours are washed out and there is far less detail obvious. They tend to 'pop' more in the HDR post. On my system there was a huge difference in the quality between the two posts.
As for cropping the whole aim of thsi post was not to present a well framed shot but to compare the effect of HDR against a single shot. I accept that maybe I should have gone that one step further and cropped. But I wanted to show the effect of HDR in bringing out some of the detail especially at the rear of the shed.
Cheers
Ken

[Viana]

So noted, Ken. I suppose this is the sort of shot that IMHO would greatly benefit from Topaz filters.

[Colin Southern]

Just for fun ...

I took the top image, and in Adobe Camera RAW ("ACR"),

- applied some fill light to raise the shadows

- lowered the brightness to lower the washout of the colours

- applied some clarity for local contrast enhancement

- applied some vibrance to push the colours

- and (in Photoshop) applied some output sharpening

[Bobobird]

And... the straight shots becomes a very good shot in Colin's hands. But the HDR shot retains the dirty dusty look of the windshield and top of truck.

[Colin Southern]

But the HDR shot retains the dirty dusty look of the windshield and top of truck.

But I needed clarity to be able to see out of the windscreen

[Bobobird]

That truck will get you a ticket for making the officer's uniform dirty.

[FrankMi]

Hi Ken, based on your comments about the differences in the images on your monitor, I'm wondering if you are having an issue with the monitor? It might be worthwhile to see if you could view these shots on someone elses PC/monitor?