HDR Photography

[Nuno]

Hi everybody!

Some time ago I was very enthusiastic about making HDR photos.
My purpose in making HDR was to get highlights and shadows with the best detail possible, and doing that, I hoped to get a very high dinamic range in my picture. (I was using the bracketing funtion all the time)

And I really got wat I wanted, but not only.
I use Photomatix and I find very hard to avoid those white halos, and the colour seems always very "cartooned".
Does anyone have any tips about making an HDR without noticing that it is an HDR?

Thanks!

[Pebal]

You try the SNS-HDR Pro. SNS-HDR is very good for natural-looking HDR images.

[Clactonian]

Good examples. Swedish architecture Pebal?

[Pebal]

Swedish architecture Pebal?

Yes.

[Colin Southern]

Hi Nuno,

Photomatix CAN do a good job - but the defaults are "cartoon / Happy Potter nightmare" - so you just need to tone them down.

Kelby Training has an online video presentation on using it if you're interested.

[Szczur]

If you're using the details enhancer mode in Photomatix, don't push smoothing too low. As soon as halos begin to appear, try moving the luminosity slider to the right and you may find the halo is reduced or removed. Alternatively, use the tone compressor mode which turns out more realistic looking scenes by default.

[Nuno]

Thanks Pebal. That's exactly what I am seeking.
Excelent examples by the way. They are from the SNS HDR website aren´t they?

[dogald]

I could not find a download page for this...anyone have any help?

[Pebal]

The SNS-HDR Pro you can download from the project website.

[ntx]

Nuno, I got nice natural looking HDR images by using Oloneo Photo Engine. It never produces halos and has a great control over the resulting white balance of the HDR image: it can easily work with different light sources together.
Oloneo Photo Engine is still in beta but works perfectly... I hope they will set a final price for this great software.

Bye
Jenner

[victor]

Try the following website www.stuckincustoms.com. I have held workshops in my local camera club for HDR with Photomatix Pro as the key producer. The workshop on this web site is great as are the range of pictures detailed each day.

Within my albums I have posted some HDR Work all via Photomatix Pro/CS5 or Elements. The example that follows is one of these.

Keep trying different presets and MODIFY and save those that work.



Regards

David

[inkista]

If you want more natural results, perhaps, try using exposure fusing instead of HDR? I love enfuse. No tonemapping or huge files in weird formats involved at all.



Canon 50D, EF-S 18-55 f/3.5-5.6 (non-IS kit lens) @18mm
Three shots, bracketed at 2EV intervals. Shot RAW, processed in Lightroom with LR/Enfuse.

Enfuse, being an open-source command-line utility, has a bunch of GUIs built on top of it. Be aware, however, that it does need a separate piece of software to align the member images. One of the best GUI interfaces to access enfuse is probably Hugin, since it's made primarily for panorama stitching, and already includes an alignment tool. With Hugin, you can do your exposure blending and pano stitching at the same time.

The one thing to be aware of is that Enfuse's control settings are not like Photomatix's tonemapping controls. The settings for contrast, exposure, and saturation settings are not about boosting/lowering these in the final image directly, but rather weighting the relative importance of those factors in selecting a pixel from the members for the final image. Relative means that setting 1,1,1 is the SAME as setting .5,.5,.5 or 0,0,0. If you wanted to do exposure fusing, you'd set exposure the highest of the three settings; for focus stacking contrast should be highest.

[Szczur]

But since Nuno has Photomatix, and for the benefit of others who may be considering HDR software, I should point out that Photomatix actually has a built in Exposure Fusion module. It works well without the tonemapping operators (details enhancer and tone compressor) but can also be used on top of those operators in order to boost things a little.

[Nuno]

Hi Matt. Yes I've got Photomatix, but I have to admit that it does not satisfy me.
Mainly because of the colour and noise.

If the target is to get pictures with an agressive colours and high constrast effect, then it is fine. (The example given by Victor is tipical of Photomatix)
But I find very dificult to get natural pictures with it.

[Canonman13]

[IMG][/IMG]
1st HDR image, I used -2/0/+2 and I took this in my backyard. It was snowing in April and It is close to the end of April.. I thought it was April showers bring me flowers..... Apparently its snow. Only in MInnesota.
Any tips to do better or what I can do better for more Images...

[FrankMi]

"But I find very dificult to get natural pictures with it."

Hi Nuno, I am new to HDR but I have learned a few things about Photomatix. I take mainly outdoor shots and the default settings leave the sky too dark and the foliage much to electric green. Although it produces an 'interesting' picture that is not possible without tonemapping, I pretty much have to do additional processing in Photoshop to layer back in more appropriate foliage and sky colors. In all cases that I have seen, fleshtones need to be completely reverted to the original image or they look a bit wierd.

In discussion with others I find that not everyone sees color the same way. As a result, what might be too drab or too vibrant for me to be 'natural' can be completely acceptable to someone else. I suspect that some folks see the world in more subdued colors than others. My goal is to get the image to look as close to what I saw when I took the picture as I can. This may be too subtle or intense for someone else's liking so I try to satisfy my own view of the world in my pictures. Either way, you can adjust the hue, saturation and contrast globally in Photomatix and specifically in any software capible of doing layers and masking. I hope this helps! Regards...

[Colin Southern]

[IMG][/IMG]
1st HDR image, I used -2/0/+2 and I took this in my backyard. It was snowing in April and It is close to the end of April.. I thought it was April showers bring me flowers..... Apparently its snow. Only in MInnesota.
Any tips to do better or what I can do better for more Images...

I first thought was "why was they dynamic range of this scene so great that it needed HDR techniques to capture it? I would have thought this could have been captured with a single RAW exposure, with dynamic range to spare.

[Danielk62]

>>But I find very dificult to get natural pictures with it.<<

Most people seem to stop with the result given by Photomatix (or any other HDR software). During my evening classes I've learned that with HDR one needs to take it a step further and use the HDR result as a basis in Photoshop. Open the HDR result in Photoshop, use the underexposed/overexposed shots and place them on a layer as well, add a masking layer to them, use a black/white brush and turn the final result into something even better... True, using this workflow, it is a lot of hard work to get a good picture.

Also check out Trey Radcliff's workflow!

Cheers,
Dan