How about posting your HDR images?

KWJams

Senior Member
Here is another shot. Looks like Skeletor.

Skellator (Large).jpg
 

Dave_W

The Dude
Here's an HDR I made today putzing around at the shores. I'm still not quite getting the whole HDR thing. For instance, after you send your images to Photoshop and the window with gamma and radius adjustments come up, I'm assuming this is the infamous "tone mapping", right? If so, what the heck am I "mapping"? The term "tone mapping" gives it a real technical feel but to me it seems like a euphemism for simply adjusting the photo..but then again, I really don't know what I'm doing, so maybe I'm completely off the mark.

At any rate, here's my "tone mapped" HDR :rolleyes:


Untitled_HDR3-sm.jpg
 

Marcel

Happily retired
Staff member
Super Mod
Here's an HDR I made today putzing around at the shores. I'm still not quite getting the whole HDR thing. For instance, after you send your images to Photoshop and the window with gamma and radius adjustments come up, I'm assuming this is the infamous "tone mapping", right? If so, what the heck am I "mapping"? The term "tone mapping" gives it a real technical feel but to me it seems like a euphemism for simply adjusting the photo..but then again, I really don't know what I'm doing, so maybe I'm completely off the mark.

At any rate, here's my "tone mapped" HDR :rolleyes:

Nice shot Dave. In reality, HDR and tone mapping is just shadow-highlights adjustments. If you use the shad-highlights adjustment with photoshop, by playing around with the sliders to recover shadows and highlights, you can very well simulate the HDR tone-mapping effects.

I find it much easier to use Photomatix. It has many different settings that I can play with and gives quick previews to choose from. But even after that, it's really rare that I don't have some kind of adjustment to do in Photoshop to either dodge and burn or give it a little sharpness boost.
 

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
Beautiful photo (or is that composite?), Rick. I found the HDR process in Photoshop to be very cumbersome, and a bit daunting when I watched the tutorial videos I could find. I use HDR Efex Pro 2, which can be invoked directly form Photoshop or Lightroom, and find it very easy to use, and intuitive after watching a video or two from their site and using it once or twice.
 

Dave_W

The Dude
Nice shot Dave. In reality, HDR and tone mapping is just shadow-highlights adjustments. If you use the shad-highlights adjustment with photoshop, by playing around with the sliders to recover shadows and highlights, you can very well simulate the HDR tone-mapping effects.

I find it much easier to use Photomatix. It has many different settings that I can play with and gives quick previews to choose from. But even after that, it's really rare that I don't have some kind of adjustment to do in Photoshop to either dodge and burn or give it a little sharpness boost.

Holy Samolies! I downloaded a trial version of Photomatix and it's awesome!! Almost night and day different from Photoshop. I just figured it was similar to the Nik version of HDR, which is very similar to Photoshop's version but I couldn't have been more wrong.
 

WhiteLight

Senior Member
I have a question..
Am using Photomatix, and almost every image produced by combining images produces so much of noise!
Even after using the setting to reduce noise on original images..
is this normal?

Reducing Luminance does not reduce the noise all that much, PP can remove it but makes the pic all waxy
 

Dave_W

The Dude
And for those considering buying Photomatix, here's a coupon code to get 15% off on any bundle - BonusHDRPro15

I'm going ahead and buying the bundle for PS and Lightroom.

Here's my first example using a random set of 5 that I took this evening. And what's got me really excited is that I've a couple hundred bracketed images that were taken after the sun went down and the sky turned bright pink and red. I can't wait to get them processed!

_D8A7927_28_29_30_31.jpg
 

Dave_W

The Dude
I went back to the tide pools in La Jolla for the sunset. There were some pretty good high clouds this afternoon which make for great pink skies just after the sun goes below the horizon.

Here's another example, I'm still getting used to Photomatix, so it's not yet optimized. I'm stoked that I've finally found a way to make HDR's look realistic-ish. I've got a lot more work to do but I'm getting a lot closer than I was with PS.


_D8A8251_2_3.jpg
 
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