04-07-10 – Farktography Classic: HDR 3

NBD or others…. I’m trying Photomatix pro 3.2, very easy to use and I love the result of the effect, but… All of my shots seem to be generating sort of a radial blur that intensifies from the center out. Any idea on what might be causing this? All of my slides are shot on a tripod, and if I stack em in photoshop they line up just fine. I have tried using and not using the option to align pictures when creating the HDR, but don’t seem to notice a difference.

Hope that makes sense…. kinda bummed 🙁

Yes. That’s what I was trying to refer to. Thanks.

In the Photomatix Box for Generating HDR Image make sure that you are selecting the noise reduction options, reduce chromatic aberrations, attempt to reduce ghosting artifacts–depending on what kind of image you are shooting select either background movements (trees, traffic, water) or moving objects (people, animals, singular quick things) Finally in the image alignment, I find that picking “align by matching features” to somewhat more intuitive than vertical horizontal shifts.

When you are choosing files to work with, particularly if you are working with images with a lot of tonal adjustments prior to export, it will change the tonemapping. Use files unaltered from either the scan or the RAW, I use Lightroom with a General Punch Setting as my default. I reset to unedited RAW before I export to Photomatix. I’ve had the the software choke on heavily edited images. Once you’ve tonemapped, THEN go back and adjust your levels/colors/contrasts ect.

Finally, there are just some images that will not work. Even if you have used a tripod, tried all sorts of software tricks, something about them just will not come out of the process looking right. I usually see these in the photos with a lot of small bright objects of brilliant colors, like Christmas lights. The software just chokes on them.

Much like with tilt-shift, I went a bit overboard in picking pix… I’m going to end up with 6 b-sides… and I’m still not entirely sure which three that means I’m going to use. 😯

I chose two things to “practice” with, I guess. One was my son’s tricycle in the yard. I set up the tripod and took at least 4 sets of shots, from the lowest exposure to the highest exposure, each set being at a different angle. I’m not sure the lowest exposure is even dark enough, but Hubby seems to know what to make of it, so he’s fooling in Photoshop trying to figure out how then I can do it. My second round of shots was on our bikes in the back. The sun comes through in patches (yay, trees), but it was still really light so I did the best I could. We’ll see how they come out.

They’re not exactly fantastic, but perhaps it will give me a better idea of what to go with in the future. Hubby has a cracked version of full Photoshop, and I have Photoshop Elements, using an extra copy a friend got by accident. Apparently it’s way harder to do it in Elements, hence why he’s figuring out what to do on his end. I haven’t a clue what most of the terminology means with layers and masks and such.

I might try a set of exposures in the house since the potential for darkness and over-exposure is greater. I’ll just have to figure out what to use. The cat could be a fun one since he just lays there like “whatever” when he’s napping. 🙂

If you wish to get all weepy at how GOOD HDR can be http://www.stuckincustoms.com/hdr-camera/. This fellow is an acknowledge Master of the Craft and his work really peaked my interest in what can be done with HDR.

How come my HDR images don’t look anything like the samples I’ve run across doing a GIS?

Hopefully by the time we do HDR-4 I’ll have a clue as to what I’m doing.

Mine don’t much either. I don’t know if it’s my subjects or that I suck when it comes to the whole curves thing, etc…