First Attempt At HDR C&C

[smoke665]

First attempt at HDR comments and suggestions?

View attachment 119622 View attachment 119623

 

[tirediron]

Perhaps too much of a good thing? The colours seem somewhat skewed to me, and rather over-saturated.

 

[spiralout462]

For good use of HDR techniques, the scene has to Warrrant it, imo. Also, composition is still of utmost importance. Cool subject though!

 

[Trever1t]

Overcooked...overdone. The best use of HDR is to have a scene look like it would naturally, via your eyes. All of us,when we first experiment with new techniques and software tend to over do it.

 

[Rick50]

For quality HDR that gets pushed a bit check out Trey Ratcliff's work at
Stuck In Customs | HDR Photography, Travel Photography and Camera Reviews

I really like what he does. I tend to do much more realistic HDR images so it is hard for me to push my work in his direction but I would like to go there.

 

[manaheim]

HDR is tough. I agree with everything everyone else said.

That said... you can do whatever you want with this. Some will love it. Others will hate it. For me, you've muddied the image and distorted the colors.

From a non-technical perspective, the subject seems kinda meh.

Like all "neat things" you can do with post processing, the key is first ensuring you have a good picture.

 

[john.margetts]

Hard to produce a High Dynamic Range picture of a subject that has a normal dynamic range. If you want to practice HDR you will learn more if you seek out some suitable subjects. In general with HDR, less is more, as they say.

 

[smoke665]

If you want to practice HDR you will learn more if you seek out some suitable subjects
Is this subjective or are there some general guidelines/suggestions that might be in order?

Perhaps too much of a good thing? The colours seem somewhat skewed to me, and rather over-saturated.
The truck has been sitting in the woods for many years. The original powder blue finish has faded and the whole thing is covered with a film of green mold/algae that when the light comes through the trees just right it takes on a luminous quality. In trying to capture that "green glow" I might have went to far. The shot from the rear is closer as the sun was slightly over my shoulder.

Thanks all, time to go back and practice some more.

 

[manaheim]

It is subjective, yes, but there are some technical considerations.

The idea behind an HDR image is (arguably) to capture a larger dynamic range of light than can be captured with a single typical exposure.

Approaching this another way... try looking into a room where the lights are off and there is bright sun streaming in through the windows. What do you see? You can see the inside, and you can see the details outside. What would a camera see? It would get either a black room with bright detail in the window, or detail in the room with extremely over-exposed window.

Basically, the human eye can see something like 3x the dynamic range of most cameras. Thus... the introduction of HDR.

So... if you shoot a picture that could be just as easily represented with a single exposure, you're not gaining much. Granted, shoot a car with a single exposure and you're likely not going to get the detail under the car, or perhaps under the wheel wells... but do you care? And therein lies a bit of the debate. Some do, some don't.

Let me drag out my typical HDR example to show you... Here's a particularly challenging scene for a single exposure...

^ this is one way a camera will commonly interpret it.

And here is another...

Both pretty much useless, and there is really no way for a camera to handle it. (yes, some cameras now have limited HDR capabilities in-camera)

Now if we create an HDR from a series of exposures between the two extremes, we get this...

You will also notice that my HDR is not "nuked". There are no ridiculously pumped saturations or extreme contrast. I did my best to represent the scene as close to "real"... as close to what my eyes see... as possible. This is another running debate in the HDR crowds. As much as I feel very strongly that "real" is the goal and that nuked images look absolutely ridiculous, I fully acknowledge that it is an artistic choice and a religious debate only. Anyone who says otherwise should be listened to and their feedback considered, but it is ultimately your decision.

Oh... and btw... here is an interesting example of using HDR when extreme contrast in light wasn't as much the point of taking the image.

YES, there would certainly have been elements here that would have been a little over-exposed- mainly the bits of sunlight coming in through the windows up above (the windows that inexplicably had boxes on top of them).

However, the real point in taking this HDR was to get the unbelievable range of browns that simply could not have been captured in a single image. And yes, seriously, that color you see is like dead-on to what the color was in that building.

Anyway... hope this is all helpful.

 

[smoke665]

Ok, few adjustments later, is this better or worse? Again for now I'm trying to recreate the colors.

 

[manaheim]

Uh... no. Not really. You may want to re-read. Feels like you got about 1/10th of the point I was trying to make. (no offense intended)

My advice... go shoot a picture of your kitchen with the lights off and a bright sunny day. Then do the HDR thing with that. Put the camera on a tripod, take 5 pictures from windows showing great detail to interior showing great detail. Do the same aperture for each, vary the shutter by about 2-3 stops per. Then grab photomatix or whatever your choice is for HDR and play with it.

There's a heck of a lot of technical tweaking skills involved to get it "right"... whatever "right" means to you.

 

[SCraig]

Look at your photo. Was the backup light on the real truck green or white? I bet it was white or some shade of gray, but it's green in your photo.

OT: Good to see you Manaheim.

 

[smoke665]

There's a heck of a lot of technical tweaking skills involved to get it "right"... whatever "right" means to you.
I think I'm getting frustrated, might just need to back off awhile and go back to it later. I think your comment above is accurate, in that I have an idea in my mind of what I want, but can't seem to get there with it. I'm also going to try your suggestion of attempting to create a more "realistic" HDR, then go back to this.

Was the backup light on the real truck green or white?
In another life it might have been white. In reality it like the rest of the vehicle is covered with a thin film of a algae that has a phosphorescent quality, which makes everything have a greenish cast.

 

[manaheim]

Good to see you too, man!

 

[manaheim]

Ah... I just inadvertently discovered a good bit of the problem.

smoke... you're not saving your images in the right color space. When I opened up your image in photoshop it was a totally different color. Here it is in photoshop compared to what you see in the forums:

When you're saving images for web display you want to save them using the RGB color space as most browsers do not handle color correction properly or consistently. RGB is the "safest".

If you use photoshop, do this...

Then save it.

(btw, I still think your colors are a LITTLE off... but not nearly as much as we're seeing in your posts)