HDR seems to be the Latest Trend eh?

[moylan]

I'm new here and i saw people talking about HDR, and being a previously game fanatic, i was immediately interested. So i read the tutorials on how to do it and came up with a few interesting pics i thought i might share. These were done with a sunset that wasn't anything spectacular, and still came up really quite good.

Well i just tried to post with 8 images it wouldn't let me do it, so i'll just put the best ones in here...if i had known i could only post 3 i wouldn't have sized them down so much.. well cant be bothered to resize again. so here you go.


http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r70/moylanishot/PICT3067_73_60.jpg

http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r70/moylanishot/Bikesunset12.jpg

http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r70/moylanishot/Bettersunset1.jpg

If you want to check out the album, it has a few more, and a couple of mid exposures to compare with... http://s141.photobucket.com/albums/r70/moylanishot/

And if you want to get HIGH-RES pics of anything in the album for some reason, then just let me know, and i'll send you one.

[moylan]

No Comments? i want to hear what you guys think

[Mike]

What's HDR ?
(Ahh Ok I found it too busy elsewhere)
Can we see the before photos?

[Axel]

Would like to hear a bit more about your process, what software you used, did you tonemap in photoshop? The bike photo is my preference, maybe I am a little biased as a bike fanatic though. :)

[moylan]

What's HDR ?
(Ahh Ok I found it too busy elsewhere)
Can we see the before photos?

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, and it is mostly used In sunsets/sunrises, and in scenes where there are major shadows and major light (if that makes sense) so that you can see the whole picture instead of just the mid range. when you compare the "originals" below to the HDR above then you will understand.

as for these, your lucky cos i thought i couldnt find them the other day, but since you asked i had a good look.

Here are the originals (Mid-Exposure).
http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r70/moylanishot/Sunset2800x600.jpg
http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r70/moylanishot/MidBike800x600.jpg
http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r70/moylanishot/Sunset800x600.jpg


Would like to hear a bit more about your process, what software you used, did you tonemap in photoshop? The bike photo is my preference, maybe I am a little biased as a bike fanatic though.

Well I waited until sunset, and got the camera and tripod out, and set it all up. I took 3 images in total of the same shot, but the first image was -2.0 exposure, and the third was +2.0 exposure.

Then i used a nifty program called Photomatix, I loaded them all into there (they were .jpg but it does recognizes heaps) then told it to Generate HDR with Opened Images. I set it to automatically align the images in the process (which even with a tripod, you would be surprised that they are all different by a small amount). It spat out a HDR Image. and it sounds like you atleast know something about them cos you mentioned tone mapping... so yeh i then Tonemapped it, within the Photomatix App. andTried to make it so it would look the coolest as i could.

The only thing i did different with the Bike one is that, in the original Tonemapped HDR image, the bike was a bit too dark so I Whipped out Photoshop and lassoed the bike and feathered about 5 pixels, then added a bit of exposure, and a little contrast.

But thats about it.. and i tell you what, it looks a million times better than that Mid-exposure image.

Howd i go at explaining lol, If you still want to know more, want high-res or anything, just let me know.

[SSSchwing]

agreed, the bike shot does look much better in HDR Nice work!

and nice work on the explanation too.