First attempt at HDR

[acousticsage]

Went out in the backyard and shot this. -2,0,+2. Photomatix and Light room. I thought it turned out pretty cool.

 

[WesternGuy]

Looks like you have a lot of chromatic aberration in the trees in the lower part of the picture and left hand side where the tree branches are, I don't think the branches should be green. This could be from the original images, or a result of the HDR processing. I believe that one of the options in Photomatix on the Option screen is "Reduce chromatic aberrations" - I don't know if you checked this or not, but if you didn't, then you might want to try this again with that box checked. If that does not work, then you may have to process each image separately to remove it. Also, the sky looks blown out a bit and the clouds look yellow in places, so I am not sure where these affects all come from, but that is my initial reaction. Sorry if this seems a little harsh.

Regards,

WesternGuy

 

[Provo]

It''s good to make an attempt but for the composition it lacks.
There's no real sense of a subject the if the subject intended was the tree then perhaps
maybe capturing the entire tree from a low angle up or something. The sky is blown out highlight as well besides the CA on the branch areas. There's also a line stack off to the right of the image that goes up and down I would've cropped that out and perhaps also content aware the branch area on the corner of the image since it serves no purpose to the cloud.

I am just giving honest critique so that you can improve and pick up on the areas based on your image. Please don't take it the wrong way we are all here to help.

 

[SlickSalmon]

I think it's great that you're giving HDR a try. Keep it up! Your basic exposure sequence is generally what's recommended, but in this case when you're shooting directly into the sun, you probably needed additional under-exposures. I suggest you direct subsequent attempts away from the sun for your early experiments with HDR. I found the composition interesting, particularly the way you broke it into diagonal thirds, and burning the upper-righthand corner so strongly was the right choice. But shots like this with a lot of smooth tonal gradations don't really play to HDR's strengths. The HDR tonemapping process loves edges, so I suggest you find an old building or broken-down car somewhere and give it another go. Church interiors also make wonderful subjects. I hope this was helpful.

 

[acousticsage]

All of your comments are welcome and thanks for sharing. I really wanted to mess around with photomatix, so there was not much for me to shoot in the backyard since I did not have much time. I just noticed that most people used photos with the song coming through the clouds so I figured I would give that a shot haha. I agree that the composition is not the greatest.

 

[gregg_UCT]

It's a good start! We have some easy-to-use presets on our application, HDR Express, which makes processing real fast and simple. Try it out for free and let me know what you think:

Download HDR Express

Thanks,

Gregg