Just testing out some HDR toning. Any tips would be appreciated! I'm still new to HDR and HDR toning, if anyone has any sites I should/could read up on it will be greatly appreciated ! Thanks.
Since I know that envelopes are white I can see your processing here is pretty harsh. But this subject doesnt suffer too much from that. If there was sky visible then it wouldnt be acceptable. I find the shot looks more like a contrasty xerox than a good HDR image.
This looks like a scene with a natively very low dynamical range. How can you make it an HDR then? Or are you talking about the effects of tonemapping?
Id be curious to see the 3 images used. Alex is right that this is an LDR scene so to push it to be an HDR is not necessary and what you are really talking about is the tone mapping done to it. Ive shot LDR scenes before and found that HDR processing still improved upon the final image making it better and sharper than any of the 3 single shots.
Thank you I'm aiming more towards the effects of tonemapping in this photo. Yes it is only 1 photo used in this post. I see! Yes that is more of what I'm talking about (tone mapping). I never knew there was a term for it (LDR), so thank you to both of you for pointing that out for me. Bynx, do you have any tips on attempting the 3 single shots for HDR? I've tried it before and haven't really gotten great results.
LDR is just low dynamic range such as your mailbox scene. There are no highlights and no deep shadows. The whole scene can be covered in a single shot. If you have a scene with any highlights, mid tones and shadows then its a good candidate for HDR and tone mapping. To cover the highlights shoot as many shots as necessary. The same for shadows. 3 shots might be enough for a lot of senarios, but often 3 isnt enough to cover both the brightest and the darkest areas in the image. Really bright highlights like sun or bright lights in a dark scene need more than 1 shot to cover them. The same for the darkest areas. If you have all the range covered and combine the images in Photomatix Pro you should come out with a pretty decent image. Dont play with the sliders so much as selecting a preset you are comfortable with and then tweak with the sliders if necessary. When the image is finished its not. Save it and then finish it off in Photoshop for noise reduction, exposure and gamma correction and finally unsharp mask.
