HDR and tone mapping try.......

ramdisk

Hope you enjoy, just playing around with Photomatric and it's tone mapping/HDR thing.

davidryan

It seems to me that the photos containing blue are by far the most pleasing to my eye-- ie the first shot. The mood is wondering and it seems very mystical. The last one is ok but eah....but the first two I like very much!

Phyxius

I agree, the first and second are REALLY nice, but I'm not feeling the third. The colors are too plain??? flat? I dunno?

The first the sky is gorgeous, but something looks off a bit in the water, still a very cool image though! And the second one if GREAT!!!

Dixie

I really like the first two and think that you did a great job on them. The compositions for the first two are great and the sky and foreground work excellent together.

The more I look at number three, I am getting a couple of ideas which I think will work to improve it greatly (IMHO). The overall shot appears to be somewhat flat and the broad stripe of basically neutral grey across the center detract immensely from the colors in the sky and water.

I am going to work on a couple of thoughts that I am having about the shot. I will post the results for illustration purposes after I'm through working with a few ideas I have.

Awais Yaqub

Beautiful loved them Isn't HDR fun and wonderful thing !

Dixie

Here are my results. These are just my ideas and by no means are my comments meant to be critical of the original photo. The way I look at it is that nature wasn't being cooperative by giving you that wide band of neutral grey just above the horizon which was hard to work with. If you tried to add punch to the image, the band would have gone black on you making the top 1/3 and the bottom 1/3 look like separate photographs.

My thoughts were if the grey band from the center was eliminated altogether the photograph would be much more dynamic and pleasing to the eye. Plus, you could then punch it to bring out the reds more and relieve the flatness without having a black band run through the center of the image.

If I've overstepped my bounds please let me know and I will remove the illustrative attachment.

ramdisk

Phyxius wrote:

I agree, the first and second are REALLY nice, but I'm not feeling the third. The colors are too plain??? flat? I dunno?

The first the sky is gorgeous, but something looks off a bit in the water, still a very cool image though! And the second one if GREAT!!!

Thanks for the comments....in all three the water is really ice

ramdisk

Dixie wrote:

Here are my results. These are just my ideas and by no means are my comments meant to be critical of the original photo. The way I look at it is that nature wasn't being cooperative by giving you that wide band of neutral grey just above the horizon which was hard to work with. If you tried to add punch to the image, the band would have gone black on you making the top 1/3 and the bottom 1/3 look like separate photographs.

My thoughts were if the grey band from the center was eliminated altogether the photograph would be much more dynamic and pleasing to the eye. Plus, you could then punch it to bring out the reds more and relieve the flatness without having a black band run through the center of the image.

If I've overstepped my bounds please let me know and I will remove the illustrative attachment.

nice job, no you didn't over step

Swartzy

Pretty colors
I like the first and last best. HDR is very cool but Photomatix will over accentuate color saturation if not careful...making it into some unrealistic type of landscape (although many people buy that sort of stuff).

HDR works best where you have a wide variety of high dynamic range...like a really bright sky and dark shadows. Often times a 3 frame/2 stop interval will yield the right results albeit the tone mapping is tricky. In cathedrals and such I sometimes go 9 to 11 frames as you get the whole gamut. It's a fun program. It's neat to see how others use it. Nice job.

Phyxius

ramdisk wrote:

Thanks for the comments....in all three the water is really ice

Now that you mention (and now that I'm home on my nice monitor) I can tell the water is iced in the second shot. It looks like froth/foam on my work monitor. And the colors in the first look much better on this monitor and I can't see where I had the problem with it at work.

This is the second time my work computer has had trouble with HDR images. I think I'll refrain from commenting on them while I'm at work (even though there's nothing better to do!!! )

Again, nice job!