Further HDR experiments

As I continue to experiment with HDR I will be posting my progress on the blog, there two images come from the beaches of southern England, Eastbourne for the skyscape and Bournemouth for the beach scene, the first was pretty straightforward with 5 exposure ranging from -2 to +2 and an overlay of the original image in Photoshop CS5 to bring back a little cloud detail lost in the tonemapping.



The second image was actually overexposed by a stop to start with, when taking it I had wanted to get an over bright feel knowing I could pull back a bit of saturation in post, when it came to doing an HDR I had to start with it as a +1 and work back to -3 on the darker images - at this level of pulled processing its a risk that information will "drop off" or lose fidelity in the highlight areas.

To my surprise it actually turned out okay with most of the work done in the tonemapping and the only bit of Photoshop being some halo reduction around the subject and a slight multiply layer vignette, This image veers a bit towards the psychedelic but its subtle enough for me to not find it jarring to look at.

Adventure into HDR

I have avoided HDR for a while now - partially because I found the psychedelic look a bit unappealing and partially, I'm ashamed to say, I didn't understand the technique - it requires sitting down and learning how to balance the multiple exposures into one cohesive picture and although I had dabbled I hadn't really committed to learning until today.



I processed the image above from a single RAW file shot in Thailand this February - I produced 4 additional versions of the image ranging from -2 to +2 exposure and then popped them into Photomatrix Pro - the initial tone-mapping was completed here but the overall image was riddled with halo's around the mountains and inconsistent, dark areas of sand on the beach, in order to achieve amore natural look I dropped it into Photoshop and put the original and +2 images onto layers above my HDR from Photomatrix and used layer masks to brush through some of the light sand in the mid ground. The original image as captured in camera (slightly over-exposed) is below: