My first HDR set

[bread]

Hi! I am new here and would love to improve my photography, both on-scene and in post production. These are of my first completed HDR photos. I took these at my in rural Kansas City, MO.

I shot these with a Canon T5i and a 24-105L f/4 IS USM on a tripod.

I used Photomatrix Pro trial (as the watermarks tell you) to combine the exposures and GIMP 2.0 for burning/dodging/smudging. As I was overly antsy to see the results, and because I was away form home, I skipped processing the files in DPP. Only one file did I work on in DPP.


I worked on the halo around the tree in GIMP. I would like to saturate the red going up the tree some more.


I might have made this one a bit brighter had I edited it today.


I like this one but I could not reduce the chromatic aberrations.


This one not actually HDR, but it came from the same photo shoot. I touched it up in DPP.


I'm very pleased with this one.

Please tell me what you think!

 

[Light Guru]

They are all over processed and many of then don't have a high enough dynamic range to need HDR at all.

 

[WesternGuy]

It would be nice if you would number your images when posting. Numbering helps a reviewer refer to an image without having to flip back and forth to ensure they are commenting on the right image.

I don't know why you used HDR, or whether some of them have a high enough dynamic range to warrant its use. I find it hard to judge this when presented only with the final result as, in my experience, the resultant HDR never looks like it has the dynamic range to warrant the actual use of HDR processing. How many exposures did you use for your HDR images and were you shooting raw - just asking.

I am also curious about the black and white image. Is this a conversion of an HDR to black and white, or an HDR made from a series of images that were converted to black and white prior to their HDR processing.

You might want to look into the Nik software which has an HDR "plugin" with it. The best part is that it is free. I have been using their HDR Efex Pro for about 5 years or so and it works quite well with no watermarks.

You can download it here - Google Nik Collection . It works with both Lightroom and Photoshop.

WesternGuy

 

[Ambient Lightscapes]

I think the one with the two houses has the strongest composition of them all. The others seem quite busy.

I agree with others that they might not be any need for HDR. The houses could look good in monochrome. If the highlights are slightly overblown, I would try gentle blending with layers/masking.

Perhaps you can even recover the full dynamic range in Lightroom RAW developing. In many cases pulling down whites/highlights and lifting shadows in Lightroom will produce a more aesthetically pleasing image than aggressive HDR.