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HDR Photography

From Mike Beane's Blog

Revision as of 10:23, 9 July 2007 by Rabbi Bob (talk | contribs) (→‎The Float: Added new HDR shot)

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.
Underexposed
Original
Overexposed


  • 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.
Combined - 2 Stops
Combined - 4 Stops

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.
Original - Cropped
HDR Cropped
HDR Full
Exposure Ranges


Tower

  • 21 pictures ranging in exposures
  • Noted that there is a need to drop overly exposed pictures (95% white) from the batch
Original
HDR


River

  • 17 pictures ranging in exposures
File:Hdrtest-river-original.jpg
HDR


Dining Room Light

qtpfsgui
qtpfsgui


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

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)

References