HDR Photography
From Mike Beane's Blog
This is a test jump into HDR photography. Hopefully it develops as I learn more, but it was so interesting I just took a leap at it.
Faux HDR
- First off, I cheated at this. I took 1 picture (which wasn't really a great picture to begin with) and manually manipulated the colors to over & under expose. For the first test I wanted to see the merge results.
- The results were rich in color. I shifted between 2 exposure spaces and the latter of the two was the richest.
- Having seen the combined difference, I'll work on learning on the Powershot S3 how to manipulate the over/under exposure and see what a true light picture results with.
Flower Pot
- Flower pot on Porch. I took this a few hours after the faux test. Much better
- Pictures one and two are cropped sections of the flower pot. Note the detail in the HDR version.
- Picture three is the full HDR picture
- Picture four is a combination of all of the exposures (marked) and a grayscale strip to show the differences.
Tower
- 21 pictures ranging in exposures
- Noted that there is a need to drop overly exposed pictures (95% white) from the batch
River
- 17 pictures ranging in exposures
| File:Hdrtest-river-original.jpg |
Dining Room Light
Tests usings Automatic Exposure Bracketing (AEB) on the Powershot S3 with -2/0/+2 exposure range. Subject is my dining room light. Tone mapping done via qtpfsgui with the following settings for the first image:
TMOSETTINGSVERSION=0.2 TMO=Fattal02 ALPHA=1.048 BETA=0.856 COLOR=1.33 PREGAMMA=1.485
TMOSETTINGSVERSION=0.2 TMO=Fattal02 ALPHA=0.1 BETA=0.8 COLOR=1 PREGAMMA=1
The Float
Recent shot from Round Pond in Plymouth ME. Same tone map as the tower & river shots from above. I actually get frustrated with qtpfsgui in that the displays at different resolutions when you are testing out tonemaps varies and even if it looks good at 240x120, the map result at 1024x768 is extremely different, especially in the artifacts & noise area.
Programs
- HDR Shop - V1 is free for non-commercial
- Photomatix - The older version is free (no tone tools)
- Apparently no alignment options
- Photoshop C2 or higher
- qtpfsgui
- Artizen - Save to .hdr for use with other programs (no branding)