HDR - Machu Picchu, Peru

sirsloop

I'm going through my honeymoon photos for a journey thread. I cooked up a 4 exposure HDR of Machu Picchu, Peru in the golden afternoon light. I generally don't do HDR's but I think this one came out pretty decent with the limited HDR experience I have. CC welcome! :thumb

f/20, iso100, Rebel XTI, EF 10-22 @ 14mm

DavidTO

It's a nice shot that needs contrast and color, I think. You need to set a black point and steepen your curves, which really brings out the light of the scene nicely.

sirsloop

A little better? I thought initially that it make the darks look a little funny... idk... the colors do pop a bit more though...

DavidTO

Better.

I played with the original very quickly, and got this:

sirsloop

Problem - If you really ramp up the colors or contrast the blues go way outta wack and it looks funky. I think the second one is pretty believable and unless I mentioned that it was HDR people would not guess it?

DavidTO

sirsloop wrote:

Problem - If you really ramp up the colors or contrast the blues go way outta wack and it looks funky. I think the second one is pretty believable and unless I mentioned that it was HDR people would not guess it?

Adjust the blues in curves, should help. The 2nd one is pretty good, but I think it could be better. And my stab at it is not really better, just different. Also: I've never successfully done an HDR to my liking, so I'm gonna shut up now and let others chime in!

sirsloop

Some other CC on POTN mentioned that the sky got blown out slightly from that last change. The good ol magnetic lasso... brought that one fluffy cloud back from being blown out

sirsloop

DavidTO wrote:

Adjust the blues in curves, should help. The 2nd one is pretty good, but I think it could be better. And my stab at it is not really better, just different. Also: I've never successfully done an HDR to my liking, so I'm gonna shut up now and let others chime in!

Lol... you can fiddle with them for hours and hours and still always find some small detal to touch up. I'm pretty happy with it after the third edit... i'll probably leave it as is now and work on the other 3500 images I have left to go through

Marc Muench

sirsloop wrote:

Lol... you can fiddle with them for hours and hours and still always find some small detal to touch up. I'm pretty happy with it after the third edit... i'll probably leave it as is now and work on the other 3500 images I have left to go through

HDR flattened out the midtones as it usually does. This occurs because the entire grey scale is compressed and you need to restretch only portions of it. The sky and hazy distant mountains are suffering from not being adequately restretched, yes even in your third attempt. There is no real easy way to effect such a narrow range of luminosity. However, it can be done Setting the black point helped quite a bit as it usually does, but I would suggest when working these HDRs in the future as you will be tempted to do with some of your 3500 images just drag the bottom of that curve further over to the right, thus adding more black and contrast. If the colors get too saturated you can always change the curves layer to "luminosity" This may not be the perfect sollution but it will give you a more pleasing final image in less time:ivar

fliptophead

I think there's a definite improvement from 1 through to 3. A stunning location helps.

What was the processing done with ( Photoshop , Photomatix?).