My biggest struggle is with blown skies and dark shadows all in one shot. Sure I can shoot for sky and shoot for shadows. But the you have to blend the tree lined ridge with the darker ground. Someone has to make a tool that works great and doesnt create washed out fake looking HDR's.
I have seen some reviews for radiance, exr, hdrshop etc. The pictures look great but the gui is lame.
Anyone have a specific software bthat works great and they like?
The washed out HDR look is caused by blending already developed photos with a small radius (halos around areas of high contrast) or using a small radius with local contrast enhancement (the graying effect).
There is a correct way to do it, that results in an undeveloped photo with full dynamic range without any HDR artifacts. That is to blend the undeveloped raw files into a "super" image that contains the full dynamic range and then develop that image. Another bonus is that this method is also insensitive to many forms of motion between frames (still have to capture using a tripod however).
And the results are, well, awesome. See full color (no graying effect) and no halos around the branches that cut across the horizon and into the sky. The great development (and thus excellent contrast) was done by my wife,
The script will take any set of exposures (images) that are open in Photoshop. You could even try blending photos of different scenes if you wanted to (not sure what exactly that would look like).
99.9% of the shots that Kathryn (my wife) and I do are blended extended dynamic range exposures. Even the shots taken in lighting conditions that can easily fit in the camera's dynamic range are taken with multiple exposures---just to remove any noise in the darks.
We have had a lot of people get confused at the art shows we have done wondering what exactly we shoot with. They see a 100% noise free 24x16 print from a 6MP camera and think it is medium format (and the 5D shots at 12MP really do look like medium format). Sure it does not have the fine detail, but at a good viewing distance without film grain or digital noise, all the signs of 35mm disappear.
For those in the Chicago area that want to see the results in person, we will be at the Oakbrook Center Invitational Fine Art Exhibition on September 2 and 3. This is at the Oakbrook mall, and our booth will be next to the Gap. Stop by... we can always tell who is a fellow photographer because they get about 1 inch from the print and start snooping around
Doug,
Thanks. I have been tempted to get a 4x5 setup (since it is so affordable now) to try extended dynamic range blending with 4x5 scans, but I know that my 1GB of ram is not enough memory to begin to process a single frame let alone a batch of 4 exposures...
I get 425 mb 16 bit scans done on an Imacon 949 from my 4x5 transparencies. My dual Xeon 3Ghz with 3 gb ram will handle it ok.
But I can't imagine even trying to align multiple scans and get them to overlay exactly from film.
I do a lot of dodging and burning using Photokit and can rescue a lot of shadow detail. So I expose to just barely avoid blowing the highlights. Guess that's exposing to the right
If you are looking to extend the DR of single exposures, try Harold Heim's Light Machine 1.01. It has helped me out of tight spots many times. There is a learning curve, but it has great potential...my opinion.
