First HDR attempt... Cal Poly Sunset

[anm90]

Hiked up "P" hill a ways and found a nice spot to take some photos of the sunset. I couldn't get much out of a single image so I decided to try doing an HDR. This one is 9 images combined in 1/3 EV increments from -1 1/3 EV to +1 1/3 EV. I tried to keep it as realistic looking as possible. There was quite a bit of noise and I used photoshop to reduce it as much as possible but I still think it looks a bit noisy.

Any comments or suggestions?

Thanks

1.

 

[mdtusz]

Looks good to my untrained HDR eye. I've also run into problems with noise... any protips on how to avoid it?

 

[fokker]

I can't say I find the grass in the foreground very interesting or visually appealing. The image also look a little bit flat, I had a quick play in PS with levels and curves, also a slight crop (mainly to get rid of the ghosted plant in the bottom right corner).

 

[SushiWarrior]

It would be much better with some clouds in the sky. HDR can make clouds look very interesting, especially more than a flat sunset.

 

[Stormchase]

I think its pretty good. realistic! alot of HDR go too far

 

[anm90]

I did think that the image looked a bit flat on my laptop's monitor. It looked fine on my editing monitor but as soon as I took it over to the laptop it didn't look very good. I will have to play with it to see if I can get a happy medium. I like your edit, Fokker. Will have to see what I can do with it to get it close to that. Might try to clone out the grass in the bottom right or do the crop if I can't get it to look right.

Unfortunately all of the high altitude clouds that were in the frame blew over by the time the sun got low enough to get some decent exposures with little lens flare. I have another set of bracketed images but they are plagued by huge lens flare. I was using a CPL and graduated ND so I had to be pretty careful about the flare.

Thanks for the opinions.