Dead tree & some photomatix HDR

I thought I'd just try some HDR effects in Photomatix Pro. I normally try for a 'realistic' look (which of course is subjective with HDR). So thought I'd try some slightly real looking ones and a couple of others as well - I avoided all the 'grunge' look presets and a lot of others!

The original images were three shots exposed at 1.3 stops apart. The first shot here is the middle exposure without any tweaking (ie direct RAW to jpeg conversion);



The HDR shots, again, are straight out of Photomatix, saved as TIFF and then converted to jpeg for upload without further adjustments
2. Realistic 2



3. Detailed



4. Painterly 5



5. Interior 4



6. Creative



7. Monochrome 2



C&C welcome!

Hi Andy
I like the last two best

Wow, that software has some great abilities. I really like the composition and 6 just stands out!

creative is definitely the one for that, excellent

Too nice! Loved the concept!

It's really interesting to see just how different they all are and the extent to which so much of what we now see in the photography world is so heavily edited.

See, I'd have no.2 on my wall, but none of the others, but that's simply because my eye finds it jarring to look at things so obviously unrealistic.

Thanks for sharing

Thanks all for the comments - I agree no 6 stands out and grabs the eye; however the 'purist' in me would follow danofmk and tend to go for the one that appears to be more realistic!

For me number 2 looks best, nice capture 👏

This is a wonderfully composed image, and the different presets are quite interesting to see. I wonder how you would have processed them yourself? Would it have been close to one of these or totally different? I sometimes use presets (in silverfx) to get an idea of what I can do - but often find they go in direction(s) I'm not interested in.

Anyway, great shot, and great post!

Hi Serge - I tend to try and be real to the original scene, bearing mind our eyes do perceive things in a different way to the camera sensor - so no2 (which happens to be one of the Realistic settings for me), and maybe as I recall perhaps a little more 'punch' to it.

The one I like best also, I feel the others want to bring out too much of what isn't quite visible in the original.
Myself, I would probably go in the other direction and go for more of a silhouette... there is so much we can see and do with our images!

Yes and within each preset, you can tweak to your heart's content - or confusion and end up not being able to make up your mind!!