Wish I could put HDR to better effect...

[theMusicMan]

Hi All

I am one of those who rather likes the use of HDR on certain type of images. I feel many images do actually lend themselves to this type of processing and I have seen many exponents of the art who exercise their skill with HDR techniques very well indeed. Me though... well... I just can't seem to create what I class as a good HDR image, despite trying on several occasions with -2, 0, +2 AEB shots et al. I guess I have a lot to learn still.

I was fumbling through my archive and thought I'd try a test - and see what i could do. Here's an image as jpg, then I used Photomatix to apply some HDR to it, which added some noise so a thrid image is shown here with some minor noise reduction using Neat Image. Before and after images are shown here - personally I just can't get the effect I see on other HDR'ed images.

How do you HDR...?

Before HDR:


With HDR:


HDR with slight Noise Reduction:

[bammo]

Re: Wish I could put HDR to better effect...

Hi All

I am one of those who rather likes the use of HDR on certain type of images. I feel many images do actually lend themselves to this type of processing and I have seen many exponents of the art who exercise their skill with HDR techniques very well indeed. Me though... well... I just can't seem to create what I class as a good HDR image, despite trying on several occasions with -2, 0, +2 AEB shots et al. I guess I have a lot to learn still.

I was fumbling through my archive and thought I'd try a test - and see what i could do. Here's an image as jpg, then I used Photomatix to apply some HDR to it, which added some noise so a thrid image is shown here with some minor noise reduction using Neat Image. Before and after images are shown here - personally I just can't get the effect I see on other HDR'ed images.

How do you HDR...?

Before HDR:


With HDR:


HDR with slight Noise Reduction:

Firstly, please bear in mind I am browsing on my 320x240 16 bit windows mobile phone till I return from work.

But it does look as though all the hdr technique has added is extra saturation. It doesn't seem like the range of contrast was wide enough to give the hdr software much to do. In fact, the hdr seems to have less dynamic range.

Like I say, my browsing experience means I might be missing a trick, but I would say the hdr looked over-saturated, and the non-hdr under-saturated.

On my screen, it looks like the effect of adding a duplicate layer in photoshop and changing it to 'overlay' mode.

I would be interested in your thoughts on this.

[veggiesosage]

Re: Wish I could put HDR to better effect...

First thing I would point out is that you do need multiple exposures for proper HDR. The HDR image prior to tone mapping is a 32 bit image. Photomatix can make a pseudo HDR from a RAW or 16 bit TIFF file but I'm not convinced that you gain anything over and above normal processing.

Have a look at the tutorial below. It goes through what the various settings do in Photomatix which is pretty vital to achieve HDRs that look halfway reasonable. Be aware that HDR processing tends towards over saturation so you can adjust this within Photomatix or in another image editor later. It can also introduce noise. Wrong settings can also introduce awful halos which is the source of most of the mickey taking from the purists.

http://www.thinkcamera.com/news/article/mps/UAN/583/v/1/sp/