HDR Skyline

[nigel84]

With many ppl talking abt HDR, i decided to land my hands on trying it out as well... But somehow this dun seem to work as great as the many gurus did in here. Would like to have comments on what should i be correcting on. TY

Presenting my 'lao ya' attempt on HDR. enjoy....

 

[ziploc]

Hi nigel84,

In a typical HDR shot, we would actually want to extend the dynamic range of the CCD to include both the very bright (usually the sky) and very dark (usually the land objects like buildings etc) portions of the scene. In your attempt the sky turned out quite ok, but the buildings are still quite underexposed. You might want to try tweaking that in the HDR software, or taking more shots with overexposed settings.

 

[nigel84]

Hi nigel84,

In a typical HDR shot, we would actually want to extend the dynamic range of the CCD to include both the very bright (usually the sky) and very dark (usually the land objects like buildings etc) portions of the scene. In your attempt the sky turned out quite ok, but the buildings are still quite underexposed. You might want to try tweaking that in the HDR software, or taking more shots with overexposed settings.

That was extremly helpful and enlightening. I'm using Photoshop to do the HDR, but however i tweak the settings i can only achieve the sky.. The buildings all seem so dark... Does taking more over exposed pictures would compensate this? Or i have to be able to adjust the buildings' brightness in Photoshop? If done in Photoshop, how may i go about doing it? TY!

 

[ziploc]

Could you post a crop pic of the buildings from your most overexposed shot to let us take a look? As it is now, it can be that the overexposed bracketed shot is not overexposed enough, or tweaking issues in CS. It might also be helpful if you could upload the resized versions of the frames to somewhere and provide us the link so we could play around with them.

 

[nigel84]

hmmm ok, hopefully this would help. I had provided the link to download the frames, hope to hear from the gurus soon... haha... Thanks for the help.

(the crop of the most over exposed building pic)

Link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7998096@N07/476777472/

(the underexposed pic)

Link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7998096@N07/476785832/

(the correct exposure)

Link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7998096@N07/476799475/

(Lastly the over exposed)

Link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7998096@N07/476785674/

 

[ziploc]

The exposures of your pics look ok, so the problem is more on the adjustment while generating the 8 bits/channel pic from 32 bits/channel pic (tonal mapping). Try using "Local Adaptation" method, open up the "Toning Curve and Histogram", and adjust the curve so that the pic is to your liking.

Here are the samples I've done up quickly with CS2 and Photomatix. Photomatix offers more control while performing tonal mapping.

CS2 HDR:

Photomatix HDR:

Your original pic without HDR for comparison.

Notice that there are a lot more details in the clouds and on the ground in the above HDR pics. The trick to good HDR pic is to reveal as much details as possible while making it looks natural.

Hope that helps.

 

[nigel84]

WOW! that was amazing... Hmmm... it sure do work for me! looks like i need much more practice in it...