The City of Bayous

[TransportJockey]

Was bored and driving around Houston a few weeks ago and decided to stop and try to shoot some bracketed exposures to try some HDR work. This is one of my favorites of that night.

 

[bulldurham6 1]

Not sure what you shot this with but when I do HDR (and it is a rare moment at that), I shoot in 16 bit and edit in 32 bit and this is an 8 bit edit which tends to lose a lot of vital information especially in tonal contrast. Tone mapping in 8 bit tends to get the blacks "blocked up" and a tendency toward over color saturation. There is a lens (or artificial) vignette in the top corners which is distracting and I think you exposed for about 20-30% too little. It's a pleasant,well composed scene and I've always enjoyed the Houston skyline when driving through, late at night.

I used varying layers of light and dark masks combined with saturation masks and brightness and contrast layers to give a little more contrast pop to the scene.

 

[TransportJockey]

Thank you for the input. As for what i shot it with, it was raw files from a Nikon D7000. I took a 3 shot bracketed series at one stop above and below. I was really just playing since i don't have a lot of experience doing HDR type shots.
I spaced the vignetting in the corner, and i think it's more artifact than my lens, since I've never seen my 50mm 1.8 do that before.

 

[bulldurham6 1]

You can set the D7000 (my first "modern" DSLR - a D40 prior to that) for 16 bit. For Image Quality, I only use "Normal." If you are using either LR or PS, you can set the RAW editors for 16 bit (in the RAW editor, open an image for editing. Just under the image you will see (at least in Bridge) a blue line of information. Click on that and change the bit edit to 16. In Photoshop (I don't use LR), go to Image, Mode and change that as well to 16 bit. IF you do your editing in PS, you can open all three exposures and then in the File, Automate, Merge to HDR Pro which is a 32 bit editor...oooh, and it really helps the HDR. It's a little tricky but you can do a youtube search on 32 bit HDR pro and follow the directions. You can tone map in PS or since it's free, you might want to try Google's NIK package.

 

[TransportJockey]

Thank you so much for the info! Im still playing with this, as my previous camera (a D70) wasn't nearly as advanced and i took a break from photography until recently lol.