An Eagle, but is it too weird?

[arith]

Handheld 200mm 3 frame HDR; but not because it has to be. I don't know what I'm doing sometimes and after doing this I thought; maybe it is a bit extreme, maybe not.

[FrankMi]

Looks a bit too yellow to have been shot at 1PM so it might need some white balance correction.

The gold coloring in the Eagle is very difficult for me to get right.

[Momo]

my question is... why the HDR? Was there more than 2 stops of dynamic range in the scene? It does seem a bit yellow, but that can be fixed.

[arith]

Cheers Frank, cheers Darren; I think I'm showing a lack of ability with regards tonemapping. I used ACR and set white balance using a grey card, but then I put them in Picturenaut, tonemapped and then fiddled about in photoshop and Topaz detail to get it too stand out.
I don't think the dynamic range was too much but it could have been and I already have a picture of the eagle; it is just really to try out my lack of HDR skills.

[arith]

ACR says 6250K and tint 28 but I don't know how to use that in PSE10, I like the bigger gradient from dark to light or gamma so; I just used remove colour cast, What do you think?



Don't know why it is 11MB though, could it be because I didn't remove any noise?

I forgot; the shift was 15px and 15px 4px y direction and I normally chuck shifts of more than 2px. My brain doesn't work and I just forget that I used to do hand held HDR on at most 50mm and so make the stupid mistake of trying to do it with 200mm

This isn't the only one; I haven't got around to the others yet and I've even tried focus stacking. I think maybe that won't work.

[arith]

WOW; it sorta worked:

I didn't realise this wasn't real, wondered why a bee was confused.

[FrankMi]

ACR says 6250K and tint 28 but I don't know how to use that in PSE10, I like the bigger gradient from dark to light or gamma so; I just used remove colour cast, What do you think?

It definitely looks better! The higher the kelvin temperature the bluer the image. Lower numbers are more yellowish. There is a neat chart here: https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tu...te-balance.htm that shows the temperature range and what it relates to in terms of what you see and how it is lit.

Don't know why it is 11MB though, could it be because I didn't remove any noise?

I find that software that manipulates an image tends to increase its size so if you check the file size before and after using Picturenaut you will likely see a difference.

I forgot; the shift was 15px and 15px 4px y direction and I normally chuck shifts of more than 2px. My brain doesn't work and I just forget that I used to do hand held HDR on at most 50mm and so make the stupid mistake of trying to do it with 200mm

Image alignment is crucial to merging images and it isn't always straight-forward. A tripod can help ensure that a stationary background will be clear but won't help if anything else in the image is moving, like the trees in the wind.

Surprisingly, most merge software can auto-align and compensate for a lot of camera movement, particularly with today’s Image Stabilization technology. During my recent trip I took hundreds of hand-held bracketed exposure images and successfully processed many of them using tonemapping. The trick is to not have any relative movement within the scene.

In simple terms, the auto-alignment software can compensate for a position difference in whatever it chooses, foreground or background but not both.

[arith]

That's gret advice Frank:

The size of the pic is 6000 x 4242 because I always make them big enough for A3+ using the Mitchell method; but normally the images at this size are only just over 3MB.

I find it difficult to carry a tripod since a heart operation where not everything was fixed; and I'm warned by medics to not ever pick anything heavy up because it could be fatal. But they didn't specify what is heavy and some think the itty bitty little camera is too heavy.

I am used to doing HDR in a very big way such as this 24 frame HDR panorama:



So I've been trying to do HDR without a tripod; not so often though.

As it happens I also try to be a bit more artistic; meaning white balance gets messed about a bit, but a lot more with tonemapping.

It turns out my next HDR had no shifts at all; but was a complete mess because of people moving around, and so those black things will have to remain black, they are in fact greenish.

[FrankMi]

Ah, yes. Image alignment in panoramas is more difficult. You can use the focusing dot in the camera to ensure that you don't swing the camera up, down, or sideways to avoid parallax alignment issues, but with a panorama there is no avoiding parallax. For panoramas that are also exposure bracketed for HDR, it is best to use a tripod and shoot all three bracketed images for each view before moving the camera.

To process, I prefer to let the software I use to stitch the panos do its thing on all of the normal images, then the all the over, then under exposed images. It doesn't matter what order you do each set in but the goal is to get three identical panos, one for each exposure, before I attempt to tonemap the result.

You could do all of the tonemapping for each set first, then stitch the pano but if you are like me, I create a number of tonemapping images using different settings to see I get a better result with the HDR processing or not and the first method cuts the workload.

For the second image, I would get one bracketed set for tonemapping but then get several normal exposure image with folks in different locations so that I can clone out the tourists and use the resulting image to blend back into the tonemapped output as needed. That is the process I used in this Project 52 by Frank Miller situation to eliminate the 'tourists' from the image.

Hope this Helps!

[Kaclarity]

Steve
Like the idea, but to my eye I would love to see the eagle with more focus. I do like your correction though. JimC

[arith]

Cheers Jim