HDR - first attempt - guidance needed

[jasonkt]

Man I love seeing an awesome HDR photo....so I tried my first one. While I can easily see it lacks serious awesomeness, I wasn't too disappointed with my first shot. However, as always, I appreciate it when you point out the flaws!

 

[K_Pugh]

It's difficult to see. I can't really see any of the normal HDR type flaws. It could definitely do with a little adjustment in PP to lighten it up, etc..

I can't offer much in the way of HDR methods but this image looks ok when run through a little levels/curves etc. The HDR looks ok to me although you could mabe have done with another exposure overexposed by another stop or so to get a little more shadow detail.

I've done a quick adjustment in photoshop (since it says your pics are ok to edit)

Just out of curiosity, how did you go about this one?

 

[D-50]

What was your process? Maybe its the monitor Im viewing but the image you posted does not appear to have a strong hdr technique applied at all.was that whatyou were going for? With clouds like those you should have been able to geta very dramatic sky if you wanted. Also the HDRs you see are not justthree to five exposures blended in a HDR progam and thats it. A decent amount of post processing in photoshop AFTER the HDR has been created is essential to creating an "awsome HDR"

 

[pulse]

Maby try using more drastic exposures. get some really underexposed, overexposed, and everything inbetween. Also adjusting more of the hightones, midtones, and shadows can help.

 

[tron]

agreed with pulse, its hard to see the hdr effect in this pic. also, try bumping your tone mapping down a little

 

[Syndac]

It looks like a regular photograph to me...

 

[tron]

i think pugh upped the contrast a bit to much

 

[jasonkt]

Thanks for the responses.

My thinking and process for this was pretty beginner. I have seen hdr images here and elsewhere, had briefly understood that you needed multiple exposures of a shot for it to work, and when I saw these clouds the other day I had to give it a try. I didn't look at any tutorials however...

I took 6 but used only three exposures to make this shot. I did not even realize that photoshop or other programs would do the work for you. I just figured I was cutting pasting masking erasing and all that jive. Needless to say I spent a long time doing not much and had posted this result before any serious contrast or shadows adjustments and the like. I still haven't revisited this photo this morning, but it's on my list...

 

[TamiyaGuy]

To me, it doesn't particularly look like an HDR image. It looks just a little dull; there isn't much contrast in the photo, and it's generally underexposed.

 

[D-50]

So you didn't create an HDR through a program? Combining photos through masking can creat great images often sharper than an HDR program BUT the big difference is typically when masking your just masking a sky, foreground, and middle. HDR will do this to the whole image it does not just mask a sky it takes the exposures and blends them evenly throughout the whole photo a sky may have very underexposed parts AND very overexposed parts to t in an HDR. In your method your just ging to get an underexposed sky not a exposure blended sky. It really is a totaly different process. There are ways to manually mask an entire image using different exposures but to do it correctly it takes a lot of time and is very tedious work.