First HDR Attempt - Mesa Arch

Llywellyn

Well, I buckled and snagged Photomatix to see what all the fuss was about. And also because Photoshop utterly ruined the HDR attempt of this shot. :giggle

This is six shots blended together. Any tips on how to make it even better, or to simply bend Photomatix more to my will? :wink



Thanks for stopping by! :thumb

dlplumer

Beautiful shot Kerry. Undoubtedly you can get many variations of this image with Photomatix. Some might nit the halos, but they don't bother me. I might experiment with some more dramatic contrast since Photomatix lets you do that. In any event congrats on a beautiful shot and I'm sure a great adventure.

Dan

coscorrosa

Looks good to me as-is!

As far as my own personal usage of Photomatix, I always use the details enhancer (local adjustments) instead of the "tone compressor" (global adjustments - looks like crap usually). The only sliders I ever mess with are strength, saturation, white point, black point, gamma, and color temperature. I leave the "Light Smoothing" on 4 or 5, anything lower and you get ridiculous halos (it's a good way to get the cartoon type HDR effect, but that's not what I want most of the time). After generating the tone mapped tiff, I go back into Photoshop and adjust the levels, curves, and sharpening (often the tone mapped file will be a little washed out and you need to do a levels adjustment to get the contrast right and have it pop a little more).

Also, I usually take three bracketed shots 2 stops apart (often times having the middle exposure a stop underexposed to bring out the colors more). Obviously you might want to do more or less depending on the contrast ratio of the scene (3 exposures may not be enough to capture the full range). I usually don't worry about capturing the full range though, three exposures is almost always fine, and I'm perfectly happy with leaving some shadow in, using HDR to show detail in every part of the photo misses the point IMO.

Anyway, have fun experimenting, your first attempt definitely worked out well

Llywellyn

Thanks, Dan! I was focusing so much on avoiding halos on the top of the arch I didn't even see the ones inside the arch until you mentioned them. I, for one, hate halos, so I'll have to play closer attention.

Ron, thanks so much for the tips! I started with the details enhancer but the image looked so washed out no matter what I futzed with I gave up. I'll have to try the double-hit with PS you suggest to see if I like it any better than this tone-compressed version.

coscorrosa

Llywellyn wrote:

Thanks, Dan! I was focusing so much on avoiding halos on the top of the arch I didn't even see the ones inside the arch until you mentioned them. I, for one, hate halos, so I'll have to play closer attention.

Ron, thanks so much for the tips! I started with the details enhancer but the image looked so washed out no matter what I futzed with I gave up. I'll have to try the double-hit with PS you suggest to see if I like it any better than this tone-compressed version.

Cool, good luck! Usually I've found the washed-out-ness is due to the gamma slider being too far to the right.