HDR vs. ACR

[John T]

Hi John,

I've processed this from your darkest exposure so as to avoid damaging any more of the sky tones. It looked like the sky was somewhat over-exposed even with the darkest exposure -- probably one of those occasions where a polariser would have helped. I was planning on layering and masking two of the images as I mentioned above, but in the end the fill light control in ACR revealed enough clean detail that I didn't need to. The other thing you might find helpful is www.kelbytraining.com - Matt Kloskowski has an excellent HDR video tutorial (you watch them online), including using Photomatix ... I think if you watch it you'll be able to get much better results with your HDR brackets than you're getting now - they give you the option to sign up for 1 month for $24.95 USD - a pretty good investment (frankly that site is hands-down the best investment ANYONE could ever make to improve their photography & processing, but nobody ever listens to me what I keep saying that, so I don't say it too often anymore! ).

Colin,

Like the rendering of this image. It appears close to what I saw that morning. Nice job.

I did listen... and have begun training by Kelby. I have found this to be quite useful. It provides nice practical advise in a convenient and informative package.

John

[Colin Southern]

Colin,

Like the rendering of this image. It appears close to what I saw that morning. Nice job.

I did listen... and have begun training by Kelby. I have found this to be quite useful. It provides nice practical advise in a convenient and informative package.

John

Hi John,

Glad you're finding the recommendation useful - there's certainly a gold mine of info on that site.

If it helps, I'd be happy to come along as official event photographer* when you're next visiting some of these places!

* travel & accommodation charges may apply!

[Lornek]

Hi John, I was a bit bored at work so I took a whack at it like Colin. I think a couple more expose brackets, or tuning your initial EVs would go a long way to your future photography.

Remember that once you get the palette into a natural range, there's really no wrong answer, so this is simply my interpretation; you'd be a far better person to do this though of course since I didn't see what you did on that day...this is merely what I'd have enjoyed seeing



My personal taste tends towards muted pastels and is very Hudson River School or Group of Seven.

Also I made this from the preview you posted of the 3 Exposure levels, so this image probably looks terrible as it's a jpeg of a jpeg. Due to a lack of resolution I ended up totally losing the nice foreground tree, if this started as an 18 megapixel shot though I'd have beefed up the branches and tufts of needles.

[Colin Southern]

Hi John, I was a bit bored at work so I took a whack at it like Colin.

Hi Lornek,

I have to admit that when I created my version for John I struggled a bit with just how hard to push the tones along the cliff face(s) ... I got a bit bolder with the hand rail in the foreground because I felt I could get away with a lot more local contrast with it being so far away from the sky, but I also came to the conclusion that it was probably also just one of those images that is darn difficult to squeeze into around 6 stops, and still have it look entirely natural

[Lornek]

Any liberties you took still looked natural though which is the key thing. No luminosities or saturations were jumping out at me.

I think once you get yourself to the point where all your HSV levels look to be naturally occuring, it's completely up to you as to how you'd like to interpret the image. I went towards the lower bounds of acceptable saturaion levels and luminosity local/global contrast. You went with a different gamut, but still one that falls inside the realm of what a human's eyes may have seen at that place on that day and time.

Both our images are tasteful though and don't use HDR for the sake of using HDR...that is a very key thing to understand as well in my eyes.

I'll say another thing for sure too: I've never edited a single HDR that didn't require lots of hand painting work. In fact this particular image was almost entirely constructed of hand painted masks and overlays in order for me to express what I wanted. No computer software will ever be able to correct your images for you, all one can hope for is a solid set of tools that lets YOU create the things YOU want as quickly and intelligently as possible.

Oh and one last thing: after I finish the HDR porion of my editing, I flatten to 8bit and create a Soft Light layer above the image in Photoshop. On this layer I brush extremely gently with a very soft brush using colors close to 50% V, but picking out nice Hues and Sats to wash with. This is a beautiful way of tastefully adding slight lighting back into your images. Just remember to keep your Value close to 50%...drop it to 40% to enhance some shadows with a wash, bump it to 60% to enhance light areas.

Here is what my Soft Light layer looks like for this particular image. The sky is washed with gentle slate blues, the mountains get a bit of a pink and then I dabbed some mustard yellows onto some of the foliage to bump it up a little bit. The bottom left corner is darkened slightly and made a little bit cold with slate blue to prevent viewer's eyes from being dragged down there.



Again, no computer can paint a layer like this for you. It's entirely by feel and thus has to be painted by hand.

[Blazing fire]

This is the interior of a scale house at a defunct coke plant. Hopefully you can't tell I used two speedlights and hopefully the color is photorealistic. To my eye, it looks like what I remember seeing thru the viewfinder.

First of all, this is a great photo. It's very nice

I wouldn't have known that you used flash for this photo. But since you've mentioned it, I can somewhat tell that flash has been used, because the wall to the left of the door is a bit too bright.