I rarely post in this forum, usually in the landscape forum. Been playing with a couple of shots from Venice. All single raw HDRs. Comments appreciated.

Jim

These are stunning images..bravo,well done!

Carolyn

Sweet, love that last shot the most but all are nice.

Thanks for the comments one these, a little different than my norm.

Jim

Love them! Nice captures and processing.

TBH I think the first two are awful and look so unrealistic with garish colours and halos. The last one is lovely though.

Ian Boys wrote:
TBH I think the first two are awful and look so unrealistic with garish colours and halos. The last one is lovely though.

Thanks for your comment. Not all would like these. I'm fond of the garish colors and unrealistic look of these though. Something different than I usually do.

Jim

Not usually a fan of most HDR stuff, but #3 is wicked.

The first 2 do nothing for me, I dislike the efect acheived, though the compositions are more than pleasant. The colours, tonal range and pixelated appearance (noise?) are not favourable to the subjects, in my opinion.

The 3rd is rather nice, with a painterly appearance which works well.

What range of pushing and pulling did you use to make these HDRs?

Regards,
J

200231786 wrote:
The first 2 do nothing for me, I dislike the efect acheived, though the compositions are more than pleasant. The colours, tonal range and pixelated appearance (noise?) are not favourable to the subjects, in my opinion.

The 3rd is rather nice, with a painterly appearance which works well.

What range of pushing and pulling did you use to make these HDRs?

Regards,
J

Hey thanks for the comment. A break from the norm....not too much pushing and pulling though. No rocket science here, and quick to do rather than spending a couple of hour(s), or more, on serious work. They remind me of something you might see in Las Vegas at a curio shop.....one of those velvet things with the "King" as the subject matter.

Single raw in photomatix with the amount slider set between 90 and 95 and the saturation slider set between 50 and 60. Into Lightroom with adjustments to exposure and open in PS. Once in PS, duplicate the base layer and then apply an inverted green or red channel with the mode set to overlay. Then on the layer apply smartfilters, so you can play with the blur, and a gaussian blur or 25 to 70 or so and set the layer mode to overlay. That's the basic formula, a few adjustment layers to adjust the saturation and isolate and lighten the skys or whatever. That's about it, ten minutes tops. Pretty gaudy, but then, "I kinda like them" and it's a nice break from the rigors that I usually do.

I like the second one a bit, the HDR conversion really highlights the late afternoon sun. The third is my favorite also, nice tones and colors.

Thanks again for your comments.

Jim

I think HDR sometimes gets undeserved bashing. Yes, HDR processing often makes the images look slightly unrealistic, but so what? Maybe the standard needs to be -- does it work as an image? I think these work and I like them, especially #1 and #3. I like #2, although my preference would be to tone down the highlights a little bit, or maybe desaturate the blue on the gondolas and the yellow on the first floor of the buildings. I'd love to have these on my wall.

Outstanding!!!!!!

JIm,
Nice to see you "taking some risks" with HDR. I see your work often over in landscape and it is quite good. HDR gets bashed all the time typically with comments like "the first two are awful and look so unrealistic." The "awful" part I can accept because that's a value judgement and this is all about what we value. The "look so unrealistic" part I have a problem with. All photos are "unrealistic". Come on, that's what this art is about: how to capture a 3D living whole on to a 2D screen or piece of paper. How "realistic" is that?

JIm, I rather like the first shot. It brings to mind a school of illustration in 19th century magazines. I could see a series of these in nice frames tastefully decorating professional offices or some such. The second one doesn't work for me. I think it just got too dark such that the contrast between sky and electric blue boat covers is over the top. Also, the buildings become sort of faceless. The 3rd image is probably the most successful. Bit a of a lyrical quality and it probably would be the most commercially appealing. I do like the surreal feeling you got out of the water chop in all three photos.

I'd love to see more of your experiments.

Robert

OntheRez wrote:
All photos are "unrealistic". Come on, that's what this art is about: how to capture a 3D living whole on to a 2D screen or piece of paper. How "realistic" is that?

Robert

Just because you are projecting a 3-D object onto a 2-D plane does not mean the 2-D image is not a realistic representation of the 3-D object. It merely lacks a third dimension, and the mind does a pretty good job of compensating for the lost dimension when viewing the photo.

These images are not realistic at all, so they should probably be posted in the "Digital Art" section of this site. Number 3 is not bad, but having been to Venice myself, I can say for sure that the water is not such a vibrant green, but rather, is much more muted. The composition is fine, however.

"HDR" is not "daring" -- unless by daring you mean that you are daring yourself to take on comments from critics of this type of post-processing. HDR is just another type of digital effect. It would be nice to see the originals or even some B/W conversions as these heavy "HDR" scenes are not to my tastes -- even though they are compositionally effective.

Some interesting comments, thanks all.

Jim

mdude,
This is probably not the place to debate "digital effects" but I will note that when one uses the words "realistic representation" (an oxymoron for sure) one has moved out of the realm of real and into the domain of art and magic. Human kind has been struggling for at least say 50,000 years - based upon cave painting records - with the challenge of "representing" reality in two dimensions. Were the paintings on the walls of Lascaux realistic? I suspect to the artist/shamans who drew them they were at the time quite amazing and yes they made use of effects and conventions that were probably ground breaking and unconventional at the time. Whatever you want to call them, I can testify they are amazingly powerful art.

We so utterly take for granted the vocabulary and conventions of 2D representation that most of us now assume that they are in fact "real." I have, however, lived and worked among tribal peoples for whom such assumptions aren't commonly held and when shown how to use a still or video camera create remarkably different ways of making time/space intersections. Jim never claimed these to be historically correct depictions of Venice. They were specifically labeled as HDR experiments. I applauded his risk taking here because over in Landscape one gets drawn and quartered for trying anything out of the norm. Again, I accept that you don't like the photos. That's completely valid. I have a hard time with anyone claiming it can't be a good photo because it isn't "realistic" or that it should be shoved over to some other (lesser) category.

Food for thought, hopefully.

Robert

OntheRez wrote:
I have a hard time with anyone claiming it can't be a good photo because it isn't "realistic" or that it should be shoved over to some other (lesser) category.

Robert

I never said the photos weren't good. I said that the "HDR" effect was not to my taste. In fact, I said the photos were compositionally good. But when adding the "HDR" effect, the photos become a non-realistic representation of a real scene, not dissimilar to Andy Warhol's non-realistic representations of Marylin Monroe painted in the 1960s (obviously, to represent her face as purple and her hair as green is not realistic) or Van Gogh's impressionist style.

Despite what you believe, I believe that the Digital Art forum is no "lesser" of a category than any other category on this site. I believe "HDR" images belong in the Digital Art category, but then again, I'm not a moderator, just an observer. If you browse the Digital Art forum, you will see that it contains a lot of HDR photography.

Gentleman, as I have said, I appreciate all of the comments that have been made about my post. I posted them here in the City, Still Life and "Abstracts" as I thought this forum best exemplified the content of the "photos". They are a departure from my more usual quasi "69" type landscape photos.

They are city scenes, they are HDR "artistic" renditions, they were never ment to be real, as the eye sees it, interpretations of the place and time. I liked them though. Here's a couple of more from that trip...............the first from a basilica in Rome and the second from the Armenian Monastery in Venice.

Jim

As many have already stated, HDR gets bashed alott and often times it doesn't do much for me. Some of these, like #3, do something for me.

The detail on #1 on the second run of pictures is incredible! That kind of thing always stops me in my tracks for awhile.

I like the child looking up at the ceiling in the first photo.