My latest HDR Shot

Hypnothesis · Jul 16, 2012

<Cross-posted thread close, link removed. Per the TPF FAQ: "Do not cross-post messages in multiple forums in an effort to gain attention".>

This flower was shot at night. I had little option but to do so because these last 24 hours tops. I had to use a car's headlights as the light source, and the parking light introduced significant yellowing that had to be undone. Here are 3 images that resulted:

The above was the first image done, in which most effects were done in Photomatix. I tried very hard after Photomatix to color correct in Photoshop. I got the flower back to white, at the cost of reddening everything. Since this shot was quite sub-par (beyond an artistic quality), I decided to redo this.

This one is a redo in Photomatix, which resulted in an over saturated image. The flower is white in real life, but the parking light turned the scene yellow, and I repaired this by duplicating the image, desaturating it, layer masking the b&w, and 'painting' saturation back on by painting white to the mask. This came out better, but the deghost wasn't that great, so...

I decided to do it over again, this time skipping photomatix and building the HDR manually using layers. -3, -2, -1, and 0 got "lighten" over a black layer, and +1, +2, +3 got "multiply*" on top of the other layers. Since +2 and +3 were out of skew/rotational alignment, I cheated and used Gaussian blur on those layers, which I think softened the lighting of the upper exposed layers. I wanted to stay away from too much 'local contrast' and detail on this image, instead opting to make a highly informative image with some dynamic range.

If I were to do this over one more time, it would be to perspective warp +2 and +3 to match over the rest to avoid the blur. It may make this image slightly sharper.

*EDITED: darken -> multiply

Bynx · Jul 16, 2012

It seems you did a lot of work to end up with a lousy image. Here is an instance where maybe a piece of hardware would be better than software. A small portable softbox over your flash would have given you a nice illumination and color balance. I dont understand your composition -- having the tops of the flower up in the dark. Its a confusing poor image which is definately NOT an HDR.

Hypnothesis · Jul 16, 2012

Here's another quick one, this time not using so much contrast as #3 in my post above...

Hypnothesis · Jul 16, 2012

Bro, CLICK the images. The images you see on this form are "previews". That black at the top and bottom are gradients.

*EDIT: There was no flash, it was the headlights of my car. My free Kodak ES Z612 has a broken flash.

Bynx · Jul 16, 2012

Well bro, the shadow is still awfully green. Never seen a nice flower like that coming off a cactus.

Hypnothesis · Jul 16, 2012

A testament to the need for an unbiased light source.

Bynx said:
Well bro, the shadow is still awfully green. Never seen a nice flower like that coming off a cactus.

Bynx · Jul 16, 2012

Yup thats where the portable shadowbox comes in handy.

amolitor · Jul 16, 2012

What are you trying to accomplish with this image? Are you purely attempting to document the flower? If you're looking for a good image, the first one is actually a pretty powerful photograph, for a picture of a flower. It doesn't accurately represent the flower one bit, of course, so if documentation is what you're after, then you're right to move on.

For future reference, I would have tried to find something, anything, to bounce some light into the shadows and fill them a bit. Anything roughly flat and more or less white would be fine. A newspaper, your shirt.

Do you really need HDR at all, here? I'm not really seeing where the dynamic range is. You seem to be just piling together a bunch of images with the same information in them for complexification purposes.

Hypnothesis · Jul 16, 2012

I have a question, is everything suppost to be roughly even luminosity in HDR? I ask because of the light reflection suggestion above. I did want the shadow originally for some contrast (so it didn't look monotonal). My goal was to take a decent photo of this picture, at night (since that's when I caught it open, and because they don't last even 24 hours), using HDR to capture as much info on this 8 bit CCD as I could.

This isn't professional. This maybe subject 10 or so. Right now I'm trying to figure out what separates HDR from simply a cool (or mediocre) image.

slackercruster · Jul 16, 2012

1 is doable. The rest don't do it for me.

Bynx · Jul 16, 2012

The idea behind the use of HDR is to cover the light in a scene from sunlight to dark shadows. A shot taken at night when the scene is lit by a cars headlights hardly creates a dynamic range that cant be covered with a single shot. Why wouldnt you use a flash with a known WB than to use headlights?

cgipson1 · Jul 16, 2012

I find the linking ridiculous... most of us refuse to click on unknown links! Why should we click on yours?

Hypnothesis · Jul 17, 2012

'cause I'm poor and camera equipment is like 20th on my list of stuff to get.

Bynx said:
The idea behind the use of HDR is to cover the light in a scene from sunlight to dark shadows. A shot taken at night when the scene is lit by a cars headlights hardly creates a dynamic range that cant be covered with a single shot. Why wouldnt you use a flash with a known WB than to use headlights?

Hypnothesis · Jul 17, 2012

Haha then don't!

Because I'd rather control the resizing than let the forum do it, and I don't want to stretch the thread's styling/layout with an oversized image, but I also want you to see the full 1:1 zoom. Throw in also because I do not want to read Flickr and DeviantArt's terms to see if they 'Facebook' (take ownership of) images I upload. It's not like I can do anything with you viewing my images on my webhost. The trick of "send him a link to an image on my host to get his IP address" doesn't apply here because you weren't the only person to possibly click the images.

You can see that the link goes straight to a PNG and not a page. The only risk you have is that I baited and switched the preview with some gnarly smutt on the other side. Even then, I can't host anything illegal as that server is on the clearnet and I'd be liable IRL.

<Inflammatory comments moderated - Let's be careful how we talk to others, shall we? Thanks!>