How to make a HDR picture ... not

[pforsell]

This is a great page full of examples of how to never make a high dynamic range photograph. Be ready to roll on the floor laughing your socks off

I think the "education" subforum is the right place for this, one can learn a lot from negative examples too.

https://www.reddit.com/r/shittyHDR/

 

[nikonpup]

​must be my old eyes, i liked many of the shots.

 

[Don Kuykendall_RIP]

A truly good HDR should never be able to tell it is HDR. The only reason to shoot HDR is when the dynamic range in the scene it to great for the camera to pick up correctly in one shot.

 

[vmx12n]

As HDR shots maybe they are over done, but I did like many of them just as interesting pictures.

 

[pforsell]

Many of those images suffer from tone inversion, i.e. the mapping is so overdone shadows are now brighter than the highlights.

Some people seem to think that if they happened to shoot a crappy uninteresting and boring picture, applying extreme tone mapping somehow makes it a great photo. These HDR folks are not alone though, the same trend is visible in B&W images, sepia images, extreme filtering images like "oil paintings" and "hipsters" and "holga-lookalikes" and such.

Reminds me of the thing when I worked some summers as a shop assistant, when I was a young boy. When the beef or pork or poultry was getting too ripe and green to be sold, the shopkeeper put the meats in a container, poured hot chili sauce over the meats and sold them as pre-seasoned bbq-ready delicacies. The strong red sauce covered the rot.