My First Ever HDR Images

[PixelMagic]

We've had unusually nice weather in South-east Wisconsin for the past few days so yesterday I "played hooky" from work and spent much of the day shooting 5 and 6 shot bracket photos for conversion to HDR.

One of the places I visited was Hawthorn Hollow Nature Sanctuary and Arboretum in Kenosha, Wisconsin. There are three historical buildings on the preserve which I thought would be great for HDR. First up is the Pike Creek Schoolhouse; a one-room school built in 1847 and operated until 1906.



Although it was a still day I noticed significant ghosting in the background trees so I tried to go for a more illustrative rather than photographic look.




Next is a shot of the wood burning stove that dominates much of the schoolhouse.



I'm aware the photo needs straightening but that would require cropping out much of the window and I wanted to keep the window to demonstrate how the highlight details were captured. I also noticed some haloing around the stove so I'll rework it as I get more used to Photomatix.



Finally, the original teacher's desk...I tried to keep this one as a photo rather than go for the illustrative/grunge effect.



Since this is my first effort at HDR and I'm a complete novice at Photomatix, I'd be grateful for any criticisms and suggestions.

[Avi]

nice...I like your first attempts...
very nicely done HDRs...with no overprocessing...

thanks for sharing

Avi

[PixelMagic]

And of course, no trip around the area is complete without photos of Wind Point Lighthouse, the oldest operating lighthouse on Lake Michigan.



Will have to fix the dust spots and chromatic abberation.




Anyone knows the cause of the purplish streaks in the clouds and how I can fix it?

[canonloader]

Very nice first tries. The purple fringing is something I notice a lot with my shots for HDR. Not sure what cause is it, but you can see it good if you expand the view in CS3 to 100% or more. It's easy to fix too in CS3.

In Photomatix, you can load and save the settings when you get a good render, and then you can give them to others who use Photomatix and they can load them to see how they work. I think it helps to learn the program if you have some to load then reverse engineer it to see where the settings are for a particular look. Here's some of mine you can try. I wish more people saved theirs.

[PixelMagic]

Canonloader, thanks for posting your Photomatix presets. I'll give them a whirl and see what results.

On another note I've tried creating HDR files using both Photoshop CS3 and Photomatix. So far I've noticed that Photoshop handles movement or ghosting much better but takes significantly longer than Photomatix to create the HDR file. Is this a common observation?


Here's another image I worked on last night; merged to HDR in Photoshop; then tonemapped in Photomatix. Any pointers?

[canonloader]

I tried the HDR merge in CS3 and didn't care for the results. It was too normal looking. LOL. How did you do this, or rather, what format did you save it in to open in Photomatix? TIFF?

[PixelMagic]

I might be mistaken but the Merge portion looks the same to me in both Photoshop CS3 and Photomatix; the only difference I see is that Photoshop does a better job at aligning elements if there is any movement.

After merging in Photoshop, click on File > Save As and select Radiance. This allows you to save the file as a 32-bit HDR file that you can then open and tonemap in Photomatix.

[riyazi]

Nice shots

Hope your boss / employer is not a member here and reading this thread

[canonloader]

After merging in Photoshop, click on File > Save As and select Radiance. This allows you to save the file as a 32-bit HDR file that you can then open and tonemap in Photomatix.

Great, I am going to try that. And since I am the boss, I'm going to try it now.

[JC4]

Or, use the photomatix plug-in after the merge, and no need to save the HDR file. But, for some reason I don't get the same results as the stand-alone version. I don't know if its the CS3 HDR files thats the blame or the plug-in, but I've never got anything I like using this method.

Nicely processed images. The stove with window shot was very well done, for the lighting conditions.

[canonloader]

Well, I did try doing the HDR in CS#, then importing the Radiance file into PM. There was a definite improvement over alignment and much less Purple Fringing, which I think is caused from not perfectly aligned images and high contrast. But, the same set of RAW's done all in PM had much nicer color saturation that I am use to from PM. I probably could have fixed that in final processing back in CS3 though.

[PixelMagic]

Thanks Riyazi and JohnC. I do have a boss but I have the luxury of setting my own hours.

Canonloader, I think you're right about the color saturation in Photomatix..its seems more intense that the results from Photoshop. It also depends on the Camera Profile being used. If you're using ACR 4.3 or 4.4 you will not get as good results as those produced by the new beta Profiles.

Another thought that just came to me is that if you use a grey card like a Whibal to set White Balance there's a bit of an advantage to using Adobe Bridge. You can simply open the bracketed shots and the WhiBal Shot, set the white balance and synchronize all the files. Then you can simply use the Tools > Photoshop > Merge to HDR command from right within Adobe Bridge. From what I can tell Photomatix is supposed to be able to read XMP (the settings are saved in XMP format) but I'm not sure it can detect editing changes saved in XMP sidecar files.

[canonloader]

The PM xmp files are just saved settings. You can save and load settings and the sliders will jump to the settings in the xmp files.