Crockery Tower

[The Barbarian]

Building under construction for the Chinese Lantern Festival in Dallas. The replica of a temple will be built entirely of porcelain dishes tied together, with lighting from the inside.

 

[Gavjenks]

Too flat/gray for me by quite a bit. It just sort of blends into the page and my eye washes right over the image without lingering.

This happens when an image is overly HDR-ed in the wrong way. Does your program have a "local contrast" slider or similar? If so, I'd bump that way up for starters.


Also, taking an image of a large, evenly-colored subject with similarly colored sky behind it, etc. is already a bad recipe for dull gray HDRs. Why did you feel this was a good candidate for HDR in the first place? The normal file probably has much nicer contrast and would make me want to look longer, I'm guessing.

 

[The Barbarian]

Also, taking an image of a large, evenly-colored subject with similarly colored sky behind it, etc. is already a bad recipe for dull gray HDRs. Why did you feel this was a good candidate for HDR in the first place?

Excessive contrast. As you might know, that's why HDR was first used. The lower porcelain was too light; the upper too dark, and the sky lacked detail.

The normal file probably has much nicer contrast and would make me want to look longer, I'm guessing.

This looks more the way my eye saw it at the time. I guess you had to be there. Maybe I should set my preferences back to "saturated color."