A trek through an Arizona desert.

bryguy_ASU · Feb 27, 2014

My first go at HDR... I know it might be overdone :blushing:

This one is super surreal.

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Some before and post-processing...

Gavjenks · Feb 27, 2014

Well yeah it's a bit overdone, but much more importantly, you have massive areas of the second photo just super dark for no apparent reason? It looks like an alien mother ship is coming over that hill, but there's nothing corresponding in the sky to explain it...

And the clouds in the second one became all purple and weird.

The lower 40% or so looks okay, although overcooked, but the top, what happened?

bryguy_ASU · Feb 27, 2014

LOL... I tried doing a multiply vignetting thing I saw on YouTube. But guess it backfired I'll have to try it again... Gosh I'm such a newbie.

bryguy_ASU · Feb 27, 2014

Are the presets in photomatix good? Like should I try natural? Or do all the presets still require manual adjustments?

bryguy_ASU · Feb 27, 2014

Anyways... I tried adjusting to get the alien mother ship shadow over the mountain out. Better?

Gavjenks · Feb 28, 2014

The new version is vastly better. Yes, good job. I don't know if you also changed the foreground. If you didn't, it still looks better and not overcooked now, possibly due to not contrasting so much with the background making it seem tamer.
The mountain in back is still a little muddy looking, but that might just be time of day. If I lived near here, I'd go all Monet haystacks on this site and try a bunch of different hours and conditions, cause it's a cool site. If you were just passing through, as the title implies, then oh well. Still a very good capture!

The sky is also a tad blown-out. Normally you can't fix that in post, but if you have HDR bracketed exposures on hand, you might be able to. I would try doing a little bit of manual HDR here for the sky in particular, since photomatix seems to be failing you on that one part of the image: copy and paste in the darker exposure from the bracket in photoshop as a layer in front of this one, and use a soft, partial-flow eraser (or a soft selection tool shape to do it all at once) to erase everything but the sky of the darker frame, with softly transitioning edges. Then play with the transparency on that layer until you get an in-between sky that looks less blown out.

Also if you post or send me your bracketed original images, I can try to do my own HDR and show you, and if you like it better I can tell you what I did.

bryguy_ASU · Feb 28, 2014

Thank you for the critique and feedback in what can be done better. I PM'd you the originals. I look forward to learning from what you've done to improve the HDR image.

Gavjenks · Mar 2, 2014

[double post]

Gavjenks · Mar 2, 2014

Okay I gotz your original photos. There's something very wrong with them. Never seen anything quite like it. They are all SUPER high contrast individually but within a tiny band of brightness, and when you zoom in, there's just these like huge patches of gray for no apparent reason.

It looks as if somebody took a normal photo, jacked the contrast way up, then smashed it into a little tiny channel near neutral gray (or black or white for the other two)?

Anyway, there wasn't anything I could do with the HDR merge that didn't look bad because of there being a ton of gray. If you up the saturation it just makes it flat red instead. The fine detail had already been blasted away. So I decided to try a black and white HDR, to hide the weird color info and make greater apparent detail by making all the color blotches indistinguishable.

Then did something along the lines of Painterly 3 mode in photomatix, messing with most of the sliders to be a little more neutral, and then black and whited it in photoshop and dodged and burned a bit:

Not super happy with it, and I overcooked it (too lazy to do again more moderately), but the lighting is better distributed I think.

If you look closely you can see how a lot of the shadows still are just one flat shade of gray weirdly. That's not HDR, that's in the originals. Something you need to look into. Having to spread out all that data from its tiny channel is also leading to posterization in the sky, too, etc.

bryguy_ASU · Mar 3, 2014

Thanks, I'll examine what you did more closely when I jump on my desktop later. In terms of the HDR originals, is there a method or particular "best way" of taking those bracketed shots? I did them in jpeg, aperture priority, then used the exposure -3/0/+3. Not sure how I messed those up?

Trblmkr · Mar 5, 2014

bryguy_ASU said:
Thanks, I'll examine what you did more closely when I jump on my desktop later. In terms of the HDR originals, is there a method or particular "best way" of taking those bracketed shots? I did them in jpeg, aperture priority, then used the exposure -3/0/+3. Not sure how I messed those up?

Aaahhh okay... there's a few things right there to help you out with.
IMO going +/- 3 is too much. If they are overly under exposed or over exposed you're not gaining anything from them. I do a 3 exposure bracketed at -2,0,+2.

The other thing... RAW not JPEG, you're giving up so much in your raw files if you're shooting in JPEG... roughly 256 shades of color to compared to RAWs 4,096 shades.

Gavjenks · Mar 5, 2014

The amount you bracket depends on the scene. You want to do as much + and - as it takes to just barely capture the blacks and the whites for that scene. Sometimes it doesn't take HDR at all, if one exposure captures it then you can just tonemap one exposure if thats the look you want. Other times it might take +5-5 to get the whole range.

How much you bracket has nothing to do with the weird flat gray image issue. It existed in each individual exposure including the middle one. I have no idea why.

bryguy_ASU · Mar 5, 2014

Could it have anything to do with the Hoya multi coated UV filter I had on the lens?

bryguy_ASU · Mar 5, 2014

And, I guess I should try RAW next time.

Trblmkr · Mar 6, 2014

Gavjenks said:
The amount you bracket depends on the scene. You want to do as much + and - as it takes to just barely capture the blacks and the whites for that scene. Sometimes it doesn't take HDR at all, if one exposure captures it then you can just tonemap one exposure if thats the look you want. Other times it might take +5-5 to get the whole range.

How much you bracket has nothing to do with the weird flat gray image issue. It existed in each individual exposure including the middle one. I have no idea why.

In all the reading I've done I've NEVER heard of anybody using +/- 5 no matter what the scene is so I'm going to have to disagree with you on that one.