My quest for reality in HDR images

SventekozSventekoz Registered Users Posts: 500 Major grins
edited December 16, 2008 in Other Cool Shots
I like HDR, but I've been trying to attain realism over the 'wow' factor that sometimes comes through. These are my latest attempts. I'm still having some trouble with the sky! :)

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John

Comments

  • RoadkillRoadkill Registered Users Posts: 494 Major grins
    edited December 15, 2008
    Look good to me, I just started playing with HDR and everything looks muddy and flat. I have not figured how to work around that... yet.
    http://roadkill.smugmug.com/
  • jeffmeyersjeffmeyers Registered Users Posts: 1,535 Major grins
    edited December 15, 2008
    These look pretty good. I'm not sure, however, what's going on with the sky in a couple of the images. Looks almost like some sort of polarization malfunction.
    More Photography . . . Less Photoshop [. . . except when I do it]
    Jeff Meyers
  • jstpeterjstpeter Registered Users Posts: 143 Major grins
    edited December 15, 2008
    From what I can tell on the sky as it looks as if you do not have any form of UV or polarizing filter on your camera. A UV would cut down on the water glare and produce more reflections for you in the water and a poloarizer if positioned correctly wil even out the sky tones. In these it looks like you may have tried to over correct in your HDR program. Your version seems to have over exposed your shots. Try taking down the gama level, decreasing your white points and increasing the black points during tone mapping.
    Would love to hear from you on my blog, or website!
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  • kdogkdog Administrators Posts: 11,681 moderator
    edited December 15, 2008
    jstpeter wrote:
    A UV would cut down on the water glare and produce more reflections for you in the water
    No it won't. A UV filter does nothing beneficial on a modern digital camera. Some people use them to protect the lens, although that comes at a cost in image quality. Your circular polarizer will reduce both water glare, and deepen the blue in the sky, assuming it's positioned correctly to the sun.

    Personally, I think the sky halos can be reduced by increasing the light smoothing, if the program that was used to generate the HDRs has that option.

    -joel
    Moderator of Landscapes forum
    Link to my Smugmug site
  • SventekozSventekoz Registered Users Posts: 500 Major grins
    edited December 16, 2008
    Thanks guys - I'll keep fiddling with it all.
    John
  • Andrew GouldAndrew Gould Registered Users Posts: 190 Major grins
    edited December 16, 2008
    Tthe first and last ones look really natural to me, but I don't go for the look of the sky in this series. I've only seen HDR images displaying a full tonal range and looking convincing a couple of times. Good luck to you, but personally, I find that with a good DSLR and RAW processing, I can capture a satisfactory tonal range and produce natural looking images almost all the times.
    http://www.andrewgouldphotography.com/
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