First go at HDR. Welsh scenery.

Thanks for the input AlphaChicken,
I'm new to the Idea of HDR but understand the basics. The image took about two minutes to process including saving 5 tiffs with different exposure compensation settings from the raw file. Hardly a super long process, IMHO. You can take that much time in the basic conversion from raw to your chosen format.
As I mentioned in my post i was tinkering with some archived shots and i'm very pleased with the results this process achieved.

I hope you did'nt waste too much time on the edit, it looks a bit flat to me. But thanks for the effort.

It's a nice image Phil, and for HDR (unlike an awful lot of them) it's not overdone. I really do like it. The *only* criticism I have it that it looks slightly tilted, it might be worth just correcting the horizon slightly. Other than that... excellent.

cheers

Thanks Bill.
I must admit I'm not a big fan of HDR when overdone and I'm not sure this is a HDR image but i like it. I am under the impression that using altered exposures from 1 raw file gives you slightly more dynamic range than 1 raw file converted and processed. I may well be wrong. I usually convert from raw and use what i get. As for the Horizon I think it is a tad out, I think the way the land runs makes it look worse.
I've just rotated it 1 degree to the left and it did'nt quite look right. Actual water horizon is very narrow which may be deceiving.

Thanks for the comment Bill

It is flat. I messed up the color profile and noticed after I uploaded it.

Hey, I can't blame you one bit for doing the HDR, I must say it came out pretty damn freakin nice. Specially if you only spent 2 minutes on it.

Just understand you don't gain anything in terms of the dynamic range when you create an "HDR Image" from one RAW file.

Since the extra dynamic range is gained from combing the multiple dynamic ranges of multiple images. If you are splitting up the dynamic range of one image into 5 images and combine them, you end up with... the dynamic of the one image.

I think the shot looks great, really.

About the one photo vs. several combined, isn't the advantage of shooting in .raw is that saves "everything" (even detail you cannot see)? You just may have to pull the details out?

Again, the shot looks great!

JPR wrote in post #7567944
I think the shot looks great, really.

About the one photo vs. several combined, isn't the advantage of shooting in .raw is that saves "everything" (even detail you cannot see)? You just may have to pull the details out?

Again, the shot looks great!

agree about the shot looking great.

you can pull the details out with highlight recovery tools and exposure. you dont need HDR.

a single raw image contains around 8 stops of dynamic range. an HDR contains around 16. this is because you contain several images of 8 stops which overlap each others' dynamic range somewhat. when combined you end up with the full dynamic range of the scene which is usually 16 stops.

usually in a RAW image there are 1-2 extra stops of data hidden in the highlights which you can just reveal in camera RAW, lightroom, etc. using exposure and highlight tools. the shadows contain SOME extra data but not much since most info is captured in the brighter range (the right of the histo).

Looks great. My only criticism is that I don't like the way the cliffs on the left look in the HDR version, the colour seems a bit drab. When I do HDR, my last step is generally to load it into Photoshop in a stack with the properly-exposed frame to bring back details that I prefer from the unprocessed version.