Hi folks.
Here is another experiment in HDR to combat tough lighting conditions. In this case, I thought it would be interesting to see how much detail and color I could preserve in a natural light shot severely backlit. The subjects of the shot also pose their own difficulties - these coffee presses are glass, shiny and a highly saturated color all with fine detail in the press and the screened lettering on the glass. Additionally, the room itself has deep yellow and gold paint, and the placemats are orange, with a weave pattern that has a highly defined, repetitive weave pattern.
I shot at ISO 400 with a 5DII and a Zeiss 15mm at f/8. The shutter speed range was from 1/1000s for the exterior to 1/8s for the shadow detail.
I chose 5 of the exposures and merged them in HDR Expose2 - I used the "Optimized" HDR Expose preset tonemapping to compress the tonal range and get a flat rendering with good basic color and white balance. I white balanced in HDR Expose, using the white balance dropper tool. The ease of white balancing in 32bit land cannot be overstated.
I brought the 16bit TIFF output into Photoshop and finished the image with some curves, local contrast, sharpening, etc. If I were diligent, I would have cleaned up the errors in the anti-ghosting that are evident in the margins of the trees in the background. I decided to go with a highly saturated look to see how far I could push the colors in the merged and tonemapped file, trying to get them to break. They color held up very well actually, but I tried to find a happy, albeit highly saturated, medium ground.
If you are interested in refining your HDR workflow with an extreme example of dynamic range management, try this exercise at home. The dynamic range was not super crazy (about 14EV) but the elements of detail and color presented a challenge.
That's me in the red shirt.
kirk
