An HDR (or not HDR) Photo Challenge

BackdoorArts

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
Lee532 said:
Oh yeah, spot removal as that plane bugged me. 5 minutes of playing and amazing what you can get from the shadows of a RAW file.
Click to expand...

I was going to call you on cheating since the plane was meant to challenge your ghost reduction and not ghost elimination, but all I said was you had to deal with it. I just never expected you to go all Malaysia Airlines on it. ;)

Your second sentence is exactly what this exercise is all about. "Bad exposures" and "bad lighting" don't necessarily mean you've lost an image. Sometimes you just need to work harder. Not a lot of people want to resort to HDR to capture scenes with wildly varying lighting, and the truth is that in a lot of them they don't have to if they know how to get a good initial exposure to work from. The histogram is your friend.
 
hark

hark

Administrator
Staff member
Super Mod
Contributor
It is interesting to see the differences in images created by various members. As the saying goes: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There are many different versions coming in, and it's fascinating to see how the images compare! Thanks for making the files available and for offering this, Jake! :)

BackdoorHippie said:
Your second sentence is exactly what this exercise is all about. "Bad exposures" and "bad lighting" don't necessarily mean you've lost an image. Sometimes you just need to work harder. Not a lot of people want to resort to HDR to capture scenes with wildly varying lighting, and the truth is that in a lot of them they don't have to if they know how to get a good initial exposure to work from. The histogram is your friend.
Click to expand...

Before I ever bought a DSLR, a friend commented that she didn't go by the histogram very often so it wasn't really important to utilize it or to even refer to it. Perhaps her view on this has changed, but I haven't asked. I will admit that I allowed her comment to influence me because I do not know much about the histogram other than if one side or the other is too heavy, it can mean the exposure is off.

So...I can't resist asking: would you please consider creating a Histogram for Dummies tutorial that explains how to edit a RAW file? :concern: It might benefit some of the HDR images created here as well as benefit dummies like me! ;) Personally I like your ability to teach which is one reason why I'm asking. Thanks for any consideration. :eagerness:
 
BackdoorArts

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
hark said:
Before I ever bought a DSLR, a friend commented that she didn't go by the histogram very often so it wasn't really important to utilize it or to even refer to it. Perhaps her view on this has changed, but I haven't asked. I will admit that I allowed her comment to influence me because I do not know much about the histogram other than if one side or the other is too heavy, it can mean the exposure is off.

So...I can't resist asking: would you please consider creating a Histogram for Dummies tutorial that explains how to edit a RAW file? :concern: It might benefit some of the HDR images created here as well as benefit dummies like me! ;) Personally I like your ability to teach which is one reason why I'm asking. Thanks for any consideration. :eagerness:
Click to expand...

Different people will tell you different things about histograms, and while they're mostly all valid, many times they are only valid for certain situations or certain types of photography. If I had to boil it down to a "Dummies" tutorial it would be this...
  • If the right side of your histogram is a solid line running up the side, fully or even partially, you've overexposed your photo and have lost light information.
  • If the left side of your histogram is a solid line running up the side, fully or even partially, you've underexposed your photo and have lost light information.
  • If when reviewing your image in-camera it appears to be over or under exposed, look at the histogram, and if you encounter one of the above conditions, adjust your exposure settings appropriately and reshoot, repeating as necessary. If it looks over/under exposed but there are no run-outs on the histogram, you should be able to adjust the image in post.
  • If you cannot adjust your exposure settings to eliminate over/under exposure, consider exposure bracketing, checking the plus and minus images to make sure that you have at least one image that is OK on the left and one that is OK on the right, so that you have complete light information across the series.
That's it. From there, the editing is up to you. The key is to check the histogram in the camera right after the shot. If you wait until you get to Lightroom, it's too late to do anything.

I don't use the histogram in my editing very much. I have black and white clipping turned on in LR to show me when I've blown out whites or blacks, which is the critical part of the histogram for me. The rest is all in how I want the image to look. I don't need flat, bumpy, connected or any other look of the histogram - I just don't want to lose anything.

FYI, if you don't want to look at the histogram at least turn on the Highlights option in your image review and toggle to the RGB Highlights screen when you review images, this way if you've blown out the highlights it will flash. Too dark isn't as big an issue since blacks can be truly black, but when you blowout the light side there's nothing to be done.
 
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L

Lee532

Senior Member
BackdoorHippie said:
I was going to call you on cheating since the plane was meant to challenge your ghost reduction and not ghost elimination, but all I said was you had to deal with it. I just never expected you to go all Malaysia Airlines on it. ;)

Your second sentence is exactly what this exercise is all about. "Bad exposures" and "bad lighting" don't necessarily mean you've lost an image. Sometimes you just need to work harder. Not a lot of people want to resort to HDR to capture scenes with wildly varying lighting, and the truth is that in a lot of them they don't have to if they know how to get a good initial exposure to work from. The histogram is your friend.
Click to expand...
Sorry Jake, maybe we should ask Scott to look for it over Australia way!
Only thing with dragging out too much from under exposed is the noise it creates. A bit of luminance noise reduction sorted that. I do a lot of sunrise/set shots which have the same huge dynamic range that are always single exposures processed in LR5 only as that is the only software I have.
 
Marcel

Marcel

Happily retired
Staff member
Super Mod
BackdoorHippie said:
Just for the record, Marcel, what method did you use? Lovely work.
Click to expand...


I used Photomatix and then went with Photoshop to do dodging and burning, a little contrast and saturation here and there. You can improve a lot with careful dodging and burning. It's so much easier to do than it used to when I worked in analog darkroom.
 
hark

hark

Administrator
Staff member
Super Mod
Contributor
BackdoorHippie said:
Different people will tell you different things about histograms, and while they're mostly all valid, many times they are only valid for certain situations or certain types of photography. If I had to boil it down to a "Dummies" tutorial it would be this...
  • If the right side of your histogram is a solid line running up the side, fully or even partially, you've overexposed your photo and have lost light information.
  • If the left side of your histogram is a solid line running up the side, fully or even partially, you've underexposed your photo and have lost light information.
  • If when reviewing your image in-camera it appears to be over or under exposed, look at the histogram, and if you encounter one of the above conditions, adjust your exposure settings appropriately and reshoot, repeating as necessary. If it looks over/under exposed but there are no run-outs on the histogram, you should be able to adjust the image in post.
  • If you cannot adjust your exposure settings to eliminate over/under exposure, consider exposure bracketing, checking the plus and minus images to make sure that you have at least one image that is OK on the left and one that is OK on the right, so that you have complete light information across the series.
That's it. From there, the editing is up to you. The key is to check the histogram in the camera right after the shot. If you wait until you get to Lightroom, it's too late to do anything.

I don't use the histogram in my editing very much. I have black and white clipping turned on in LR to show me when I've blown out whites or blacks, which is the critical part of the histogram for me. The rest is all in how I want the image to look. I don't need flat, bumpy, connected or any other look of the histogram - I just don't want to lose anything.

FYI, if you don't want to look at the histogram at least turn on the Highlights option in your image review and toggle to the RGB Highlights screen when you review images, this way if you've blown out the highlights it will flash. Too dark isn't as big an issue since blacks can be truly black, but when you blowout the light side there's nothing to be done.
Click to expand...

Thank you for the explanation. When I read your initial comment, I thought you were referring to the histogram in LR and perhaps made tweaks to it while editing. Sorry I misunderstood.
 
R

RookieDSLR

Senior Member
My variation of HDR

Thanks for the sample images!

Jeremy V
 

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