HDR Tryout. Crit me!

Jeroenofzo · Dec 9, 2011

Hello fellow TPFmembers!
I recently registered as I've gotten a real DSLR for myself to play around with. The weather was wild today so I went out and took some pictures. Mainly some RAW's as I'm trying to understand Lightroom more. Cool stuff.
Anyway, I've made this shot and plugged it into Photomatrix to see what it came up with. Fiddling a little I want to show you the result. Spent a good amount of time correcting the horizon and lens distortion. Sir Rockwell's review tells me the distortion @ 18mm is +3.0. It didn't fix much, so i got into photoshop and warped the thing straight. Not the correct way I suppose? Any tips on that front would be greatly appreciated. Also critism never hurts. I'm looking forward to your response!

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Bynx · Dec 9, 2011

Not bad. I like how the water turned out. The tops of the building looks like it might be a little "dirty" looking from not enough highlight smoothing.

bazooka · Dec 9, 2011

Not bad, you did a good job on fixing the distortions... I don't see any issues there. The sky and water look nice. As Bynx pointed out, you have some really heavy reverse haloing in the building creating that dirty look. With some tweaking, I think this will turn out nice.

Jeroenofzo · Dec 10, 2011

Thanks for the feedback guys. I'm planning to get this printed on canvas, because I can do that for free. I'd like it to become near perfect (for me, that is).
Whilst agreeing on the reverse haloing (That's what they call it? Another thing learned

), how do you suggest on fixing that? Dodging in PS? Back to photmatix and play with the highlights? As i renember the setting for that was 70% which is already quite high. And is there some way to avoid getting halos? In the photographing part that is!

Cheers!

bazooka · Dec 10, 2011

I do not know if that's what it is called... I think I made up that term.

I would make sure it goes away in your photomatix before I do touchup stuff in PS. I'm not familiar enough with photomatix and I don't have it in front of me at the moment to tell you, but it's the main processing that is being pushed too far. You can also see the light halo around the entire building extending into the sky. While I think this actually kind of works with this image because of the way the sky is naturally backlighting the building, it usually doesn't. If it were me, I'd back off on the "strength".

If you wanted to keep the effect around the building but fix it inside the building, you could probably put one of the original shots as a separate layer in PS under this one and carefully blend in the original... so the building itself wouldn't have HDR processing, but the rest of the image would.... just an idea, it might work, it might not. You would have to carefully adjust color balance and saturation to match the HDR image, or get close at least.