Old church (First try at Affinity Photo HDR)

[Thornton]

Following some advice on C in C I have decided to go for Affinity Photo to replace my old Photoshop Elements. Still lots of learning to do but I tried this. (Raws first converted to TIFF in DPP!).
One thing that puzzled me was that I found an AP instruction video and followed it and didn't like the result at all:it made the shot hazy, as if the church were full of incense (it isn't). By the way, if the building looks a bit odd, I may be partly responsible, but the arcade definitely leans inwards quite a lot (and has unusual beams across the nave to stop it leaning in further).

[JohnRostron]

This image looks fine to me. I cannot detect any haze.

After applying HDR to an image, whether in Affinity or anything else, you would have been offered the opportunity to modify the image in the Tone Mapping stage. You would have been offered various presets, or you can vary the parameters via sliders. Did you do this step? Or did you accept the default output? You may well have found that it makes a big difference!

Since buying Affinity, I now rarely use any other HRD program.

John

[Thornton]

I initially just tweaked the local contrast slider a bit from the preset. Then I found an AP video (I must say that I found the video presentation good) and tried what it suggested, lowering the black point to zero and appying a curves adjustment, and the result of replicating what was done in the video seemed to give a hazy or smoky look to my image. So I didn’t bother with that step and just reduced the highlights and tried to adjust the perspective a bit, and sharpened.

I always try to go for a realistic looking conversion as far as possible. I must say I found it pretty easy to use this part of AP.

This is an HDR of the same church looking the other way. I processed it with DPP, then Photomatix and finally lightened the shadows a bit more on the iPad because they looked a bit dark still:



T

[John 2]

A couple of nice shots, just a couple of highlights burned out on the pillars but I'm sure you can adjust the HDR process to correct for that.

[Shadowman]

Some programs have filters (Nik) such as realism, surreal, depth, drama, etc. that adds different levels of punch, some programs don't really give you a choice and just push the envelope on gaudy renderings, this program seems to fall within the realm of realism/drama and looks good as presented.