Does this HDR landscape look good? Still learning!

Rhuarc

Over the last couple of months some friends and I have gone out hiking quite a bit. This has lead me to creating alot more landscape shots. One problem I have bumped up against is the Dynamic Range of many scenes far exceeds the ability of my camera. This is usually due to being down in the mountains where we are in the shadows, and there being very brightly lit areas where the sun is hitting. Please keep in mind that I am looking to create realistic photos with normal colors. The only reason I want to use HDR is to get the complete tonal range of a scene correct, as I saw it. I have tried using both Photomatix Pro, and the CS5 Merge to HDR Pro function in Lightroom. I have not been happy with how the results have turned out. I don't know if I am just using the software wrong, but today I decided to try manually blending three exposures, and I'm pretty happy with how they turned out.

Here are three exposures that I took of a waterfall. I have included both the result as scene by the Merge to HDR Pro function, and then the result I was able to come up with by manually Masking and Blending. Could someone please tell me if the version that I blended looks good? I thought it came out pretty good for a first go. And then, is there any way to get a similar result from the Merge to HDR Pro functionality that would eliminate much of the time spent doing it the manual way?

Thanks in advance!

AEB straight out of camera at -2, 0, +2


Blended version from Merge to HDR Pro. After it had merged I opened it in Camera Raw and attempted to play with Curves and things as well.


Finally, the manually masked and blended version that I created today.

VA64Skyhawk

Nice job! In the lower left quadrant though there seems to be a line along the left edge of the waterfall which has a white balance bluish cast. You sure picked a tough one to work on though. Keep at it.

Thanks, Rich

kdog

I think you have two issues here. First, you lost a lot of detail in the water in your post processing. If you bring it into ACR, you'll see a lot of blown pixels there. I'm guessing it was fine before adjusted the curve. Also, there's still a bluish cast over the whole photo. I would redo the post processing to warm up the color temperature in RAW, and bring down the exposure before you apply the curve.

JSPhotography

very nice,

Rhuarc

kdog wrote: »

I think you have two issues here. First, you lost a lot of detail in the water in your post processing. If you bring it into ACR, you'll see a lot of blown pixels there. I'm guessing it was fine before adjusted the curve. Also, there's still a bluish cast over the whole photo. I would redo the post processing to warm up the color temperature in RAW, and bring down the exposure before you apply the curve.

I will go in and try to work on the color temperature.

The blown pixels on the water is actually an effect that I kind of like in waterfall photos. I like the silky smooth look that a longer exposure gives. I know this is a style choice, and that there may be those people who do not like this.

Thank you for your feedback! Anyone have any ideas on how to acheive these similar results using the software that is actually designed to do this without all the masking and manual effort? I would have thought tone mapping could get a similar result.

pathfinder

When I am manually blending different exposures of sunlit and shaded areas in the same frame, I will frequently use sunlight for the white balance of the sunlit area, and shade for the white balance of the shaded areas. I have never seen this described in books or on the web, but it just seemed to make sense to me, and the few images I have done it on, seem to work. I have done this with one RAW file that I was rendering into two versions, one for sunlit highlights, and one for shaded shadows, as well, altering the white balance in ACR for each rendering..

This is an image in which I used shade for the interior of the building, and sunlight, for the WB for the outside seen through the doorway and the window. Does the white balance in this image seem right to you?

BinaryFx

Personal/subjective thoughts follow...

If possible, I would have a go at getting the white balance right before the HDR stage.

Next, I would use exposure fusion/blending instead of HDR tone mapping. Exposure fusion/blending will give you the extended dynamic range without the overdone local/micro contrast all over the photo (when everything has detail, nothing has detail).

Then I would do a tone mapping HDR step, or Topaz detail or whatever to increase the appearance of detail. I would then layer this over the exposure fusion image. Finally I would add a layer mask to the upper detail image, to decrease the detail in the background areas and to moderate it in the foreground (so that the foreground has more detail than the background).

EDIT: Links to common exposure fusion software -

http://software.bergmark.com/enfuseGUI/Main.html
http://imagefuser.sourceforge.net/



Sincerely,

Stephen Marsh

http://binaryfx.customer.netspace.net.au/ (coming soon!)
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/
http://prepression.blogspot.com/

paddler4

I have only done a modest amount of this, but I agree with several of the comments above. I agree with Stephen that exposure blending produces much more natural results than HDR. I us LR Enfuse for blending, but unlike Stephen, I don't do anything with HDR software after the image is blended. For example, here is a two-image merge using HDR pro:



and here is the same image with LR Enfuse:



Compare the skies. Also, the color of the rocks at bottom left are correct with LR Enfuse but not with HDR pro.

I also agree: set the WB first. Re wanting a silky look on water: you can do this without blowing out highlights by using a slow exposure.

Rhuarc

Thanks for the replies everyone! I certainly have a lot of things I can work on to get better at this stuff now! I am going to try out that LR Enfuse program. I think I like the look of the blends better than that of HDR, unless I am going for the over the top look.