Wayside Grist Mill, inside & out

I finally got around to taking some new pictures so that I could put Photomatix through its paces. This is the first time that I have succeeded in producing anything worthwhile with Photomatix - mainly because my previous shots weren't worthwhile, and my older HDR shots were night shots, which PM doesn't handle very well IMHO.


I'm not all too happy with this shot, to be honest. It took hours trying different settings with different image sets. All my outside scenes were shot as a group of 3 images 2 stops apart. I don't think that covered the dynamic range of the scene very well. Next time I'm going to be sure to do 7 shots at 1 stop apiece, just to make sure that I cover the DR.

With the 3 original shots, the resulting Photomatix image didn't look very good - much worse than this. I even tried to play with more "surreal" setting, trying to see if I could somehow rescue it, and that didn't work at all, so I stayed with more traditional output.

So I used Lightroom and spit out some adjustments, adding 3 shots at -1 exposure from LR. I took the last shot and added a stop. The end result was 7 shots, each 1 stop apart, though they came from 3 raw images 2 stops apart. After all that, I still had to play around in Photoshop, trying to get it right.


Again, I'm not all that happy - I think this could have been much better. More experience is required - with shooting and Photomatix.

Wow, great stuff. I love places like this. What's the red from? Not a TV or a computer in sight.

Thanks Mitch.

The red is just the color that the camera captured - though with a bit of saturation boost from Photomatix. I assume it's a combination of the colors of the light bulbs and wood. The wood had that beautiful hundred-year-old look to it, and the lighting intensified the red tones. I don't remember it being anywhere near that red, but I often love the weird tinting that the camera captures in these low-light HDRs.

In the 9-shot series, the color temp varied by over 2300 between the darkest and the brightest shots. The brightest shot was the only one that showed anything close to the correct color for the trees in the windows. I cut & pasted the White Balance and tinting from that shot to the other 8 in the series, and this is what I got.

Funny thing about Lightroom - if you leave the WB on "As Shot" it will not cut & paste the temp or tinting to other photos. You have to change the WB to "Custom" - but don't make any other changes - and then it will cut & paste the WB and tinting perfectly.

I was wondering about that. I have registered a "default" setting for ACR. so, whatever the camera does with the W, and I always leave it on Auto when I open the RAW in ACR, it always goes to 5250, which seems to be the nicest color for daylight. Saves a lot of messing with sliders on my part.

I think those are great shots.

Mitch, I would suggest experimenting a little. Check the "As Shot" view of some of the frames and see what they look like. It seems that you like the natural look, so your preset makes sense. But sometimes the camera just sees things a little differently than we do, and it can be quite interesting.

I also prefer the natural look, though I have been playing a bit with Photomatix because the (milder) effects it produces can be quite interesting. I guess that it's growing on me.

I just tell myself that if the camera is set to Auto White Balance, but comes up with some crazy tint, then that crazy tint must be "natural".

Excellent shots. The color really jumps off the photo.

I tried the first shot with HDR PhotoStudio. I like this version a lot more.