3rd day with my DSLR.. A whole slew of HDR's

[itBurns]

So I'll come right out and say I am a huge fan of HDR photos. Up until ~3 days ago, I've never used any other camera besides a P&S, but I picked up a Nikon D3100 because I wanted to start taking better photography.

At first I thought I liked extremely surreal looking HDR photos, but since, I think I've toned it down a bit. I think I'm improving every shot I do, so I figured I'd let you guys tell me what you think.

These photos were taken between 9/19 and 9/20, and in order from the first processing, to the last.

 

[bazooka]

I'm glad you have toned it down. I really like #3... that's a very good processing job imo. Some of the others have distracting halos that you have to watch out for (unless, for some reason, you like them).

 

[itBurns]

Thanks Bazooka

How do you fix halos in Photomatix? I definitely see the halo in the Mansion picture .. I should try and redo that HDR. Besides the mansion though, I think I did pretty well reducing any haloing in the others, yes?

 

[itBurns]

Okay so I fixed the haloing on the Mansion. This version looks more "natural" in my opinion, though, I think the original version shows the mansion better. Opinions?

Version 2:

and, so you don't need to scroll all the way back up, here again is Version 1:

 

[bazooka]

The following are the halos I see...

#1 slight haloing around the trees
#3 again, slight haloing
#4 (mansion) strong haloing against sky
#13 strong patchy haloing amongst the trees
#17 around the viewing scope
#22 inside the memorial stone (bright spot is actually a 'halo')

I'm not experienced enough with photomatix to instruct on how to reduce haloing. I know there are so many sliders you can play with and it's not clear to me what each of them actually does. You just have to play with it. The most important thing is to learn to see the halo's so you know they need to be fixed.

As for the mansion, you are correct that the original mansion version shows more detail. The mansion itself doesn't look too bad but the halo in the sky, the halo around the trunks of the trees to the left and the horizontal halo along the green grass 'horizon' on the right side scream "overcooked hdr". When compared to the 2nd version, it looks way overcooked, but by itself, it's not terrible. I think you could find a happy medium between the two.

In all honesty, if you shoot in RAW, you could probably do a fine job with cs5 by selectively brushing in a higher exposure on the mansion in a single shot. If in jpeg, you can use the dodge tool for a similar effect.