First HDR attempts

I'm not a huge fan of HDR but I think it can be useful in certain situations.
These are my first attempts at HDR. The first because I was shooting into the sun & would have had the stones in silhouette, and the 2nd because the light was dull. I doubt I'll be able to return whilst it's still iced up so couldn't wait for better light so used HDR to lift it a little.

Both from 3 exposures 1+1/2 stops apart. Tonemapped in Photomatix.

I'm hoping I haven't overdone them & would like your opinions please to help me improve my results.



[IMG]http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q105/RR76/bbframed.jpg[/IMG]






[IMG]http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q105/RR76/frozenwalkframed.jpg[/IMG]

HDR = High Dynamic Range. One takes a set of photographs at different exposures (e.g. at recommended exposure, +1 stop and -1 stop) and then uses a specialized piece of software to firstly map the image as a 48bit image, then to "tone map" it back to a 16/8 bit image. It is a way of dealing with situations where the light and dark areas of a scene are greater than the range than can be captured by the sensor. It can be used to make quite realistic shots like those here (lovely by the way, not overdone at all) or they can be very surreal.

Cheers, Kris.

Very nice HDR. Top photo a little too bluish or lose the blue highlights on the frame.
bb2

This is a matter of taste of course but I think they are slightly overdone. They look stunning but obviously unnatural.

I think a little less contrast and saturation would make them look less artificial looking. Less could be more in this case.

As far as the exposure goes - they look good.
However, a couple of technical "niggles":

1) The first has a blue/red CA on the edges of the rock. It may well be Photomatix and the "HDR halo" going on - the lower left edge of the protruding rock has a bright halo.

2) The second has some serious purple fringing on the tree to the right in addition unnatural looking clouds top right. This is likely down to Photomatix and "HDR halo" again

Often you will need to manually blend in a "regular" exposure in Photoshop to make it more natural and iron out the issues that HDR can bring. That step doesn't take long, but helps a lot in producing a natural image:
* Load the HDR result into Photoshop
* Load a suitable regular shot and place on a layer above the HDR shot
* Add a "Hide All" layer mask to the top layer
* Pick the gradient tool (in "Foreground to transparent" with opacity around 20%, white as foreground) and stroke on the mask to reveal the regular shot
* Tidy up with a soft white & black brush set to opacity 50% (white = show; black = hide)

They could also do with a touch of sharpening for web

Just keep practising!
Matt

Thanks for the opinions guys. Have just checked this thread at work and my images do appear a little more saturated than i remember, i'll have to get some prints and see how they look. Matt, i'll look into that masking technique you described. I'm saving my processing and photoshop tutorials for a rainy day. Just needed to see what i could achieve quickly as there.s no point me bracketing shots if i cant use them. Hopefully i'll get good light but if not, and it.s a rarely seen scene then it.s good to know you can produce a workable image if only for posterity's sake !