Monday, July 7, 2008

High Dynamic Range (HDR) Rural Landscape

After adding a little snap for the printer, this is the second version:
The sky is still a little washed out.... soooo....

I went back to same spot I was during the previous post and decided to give it a go with Photomatix Pro (tonemapping and HDR software). The trick was to make this as realistic as possible while exposing all the detail in the shadows. Objectively looking at the shot now, I may re-process the image with a slight bit more contrast.

I find Photoshop CS3's HDR function not quite as good as Photomatix. Photoshop tends to really soften the image and requires much more sharpening work than Photomatix does. Colours don't seem to come out quite as vibrant for me.

According to famous wildlife and landscape photographer Bryan Peterson, in order to get full dynamic and tonal ranges, you need to bracket an HDR to the extreme limits. I usually shoot a minimum of 5 shots, with as much as 8. Two of the shots will be extremely underexposed (almost no light at all) and overexposed (almost no dark at all). One will be the correct exposure and the other two about half-way between the extreme exposures. Usually EV compensation on a camera is NOT enough to get all detail. One thing I have noticed though, is that the more exposures you blend, the softer the image gets.

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