The mandatory HDR car shot

Hi folks,

This image is nothing special but I froze my ass off today to shoot in the bright mid afternoon direct sunlight - the bane of a car photographers existence - so I figure I'd share the results. Normally you wait until the early evening to shoot a shiny thing like a car, but, being HDR I figured it would give me a chance to experiment with 1) harsh lighting and 2) a very blue (highly saturated) subject.

Not so bad, considering the very intense specular hits and the high contrast scene. This was an uninteresting test scene shot as part of a little study on generating calibration curves in Photoshop.

The merge was done in PixInsight - this is super-nerdy (i.e., I LOVE it) image processing software that I recently became aware of that is used in astrophotography. It is super cool, for real. The merge was exported as a 32bit TIFF and finished in Photoshop.

Link to PixInsight - If nothing else, watch the video tutorials - they are fascinating.

https://pixinsight.com

kirk

Great job with the tonemapping Kirt and a big thanks for the link! (CS major here with a focus in computer graphics)

Glad you like the link - steep learning curve for me, but the toolset seems right for what I like doing.

kirk

A little more neutral rendering. Not so over the top. It could use more contrast to give it pop, if you wanted to go that direction.

And here is a toning from the PixInsight HDR data, performed with GingerHDR and Magic Bullet Looks.

I prefer this toning, I hope converting it and downsampling it has not completely ruined it. Included is a 50% crop of the front wheel and grille area showing the DR and detail preserved.

I am somewhat aghast and ashamed at my previous attempts. As with most HDR data, it takes me a while to get to know its quirks and I usually take multiple toning attempts to begin to get the hang of a particular scene. Still working on this one.

kirk

And a little bit of extra schmaltz. DOF and vignette, learning various tricks in After Effects.

:0

kirk

I think I'm finally getting the hang of a rough PixInsight workflow. Here is the same scene, merged from 3 raw images into a 32 bit data set. The linear data were stretched once to balance the histogram (more on this later) and then saved as a 32bit TIFF brought into PSCS6 for finishing.

This treatment avoids the clipping in the blue of the car as the mid-tones get remapped into the highlights near very bright areas - note the lack of that super-bright, overly saturated blue that occurs near specular hits.

It is taking me some steep learning to get into the PixInsight way of processing, but it is worth it. Note to all of the Zero Noise people who lament Guillermo's no longer developing ZN - PixInsight works in a very similar way when doing the HDR composition and supports the histogram stretching required to remap the linear output.

I'm not even going to bother to criticize my previous attempts - they are awful.

Here is the image:

The detail preserved in that crop is spectacular! I like the beads of water on the car

They look sharper than maybe they normally would because they were frozen. It was about 20°F when I shot that image.

kirk

Fooled me! I won't let your secret out.

Love the close up. Something about tires and HDR, I like very much.

another test post for size