March 18, 2010

Experimenting with HDR

Photographed on 17th March 2010

45 photos where processed in Photomatix which resulted 15 tone mapped HDR files what then were sent to Registax for final output. Afterwards Photoshop CS was used for tone adjustments, USM and for ground replacement from a single frame.

All comments are welcome !!!


22 haloFor this attempt I took 3 photoset (1/1000, 1/1600 and 1/2500) with 25 second intervals. Overall 6 minutes.


22 halo
Now here is a non-HDR stack of 15 frames. Same scene, but frames only with an exposure time of 1/1600sec.

22 haloHere's my best attempt to get the most out of a single frame. Only RAW processing.

22 haloAnd here's another single frame with RAW processing and USM filter.

USM settings were lowered twice compared to the USM settings in stacks above.

After some huge amount of afterprocessing it almost seems that HDR is waste of time especially when trying to keep the typical HDR look as minimal as possible. After comparing these two side-by-side I notice the HDR reveals better colours and contrast but nothing marginal compared to the regular stack. One can almost say, that it all depends on halo display and this one perhaps isn't the best candidate to participate in the HDR-stack vs. regular-stack show. However, a halo display here was an ideal test subject and it's HDR stack turned out petty well.

2 comments:

Vladimir Galynsky said...

how you make 45 photo?

from one place?
series or long time beetwin the frame?

Marko Krusel said...

I updated the post with an additional information and images.
Check them out !

But I reply, however...I took 3 photos every 25 seconds. Overall 6 minutes. Total of 45 photos.One tone mapped HDR file was generated from 3 different exposures. So it makes 15 HDR files what then stacked in Registax.