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
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)