Bath city at night, first HDR for C&C

[wjh31]

HDR gets alot of coverage in alot of areas, so of course ive been tempted to have a dabble. Ive finally gotten to the stage where ive got one that i like the way its come out. Bath city centre at night.

6 images. 5@iso100, 1,2,4,8,30s +1@iso400, 30s, all keyed in manually. I know its not particularly evenly spaced, and i shouldnt change the iso to change the exposure, but i wanted the low iso for IQ, and dont have a remote to take exposures over 30s, so just used the iso400 to get the sky a bit better exposed.

Anyway i can drone on forever, C&C please.

[Colin Southern]

Hi Will,

Looks good, but I'd be inclined to crop off the top 1/3 and give it a bit of a sharpen for starters.

[wjh31]

I had considered the crop, not sure why i decided against it in the end...
I feel it looks slightly overshapened now, but maybe thats just me or a result of scaling it down. Composition etc is a more general issue, are there any HDR specific criticisms?

Thanks

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Will,

I was unconvinced by the local contrast, so I had a play; what do you think?


Here's what I did:
Moved the Black O/P point up to 5 and the White O/P down to 235, thus creating blank areas on the histogram left and right.
I also moved the I/P grey slider to 0.9 to darken the mid-tones a little.
Then I did a Local Contrast Enhance with USM: 30%, 100px and 0 th.

After the above, the sky lighting looked more like flare (to me), so I wiped a large burn tool, set to 50% on mid-tones over the bit above the cathedral.

Unfortunately, I have destroyed some of the no doubt hard won highlight detail in the process, even after trying to prevent that by setting the white point at 235.

Cheers,

[wjh31]

I think its a bit of an improvement, the buildings look a little clearer now. I wouldnt worry about loosing any of the highlights, theres such a large amount recovered compared to one of the original single shot's it would take alot, i will post one of them for comparison tomorow.

[wjh31]

as promised, one of the LDR source images for comparison