Subtle HDRs

I'm one of those who are not particularly keen on some strong unnaturally looking HDR effects (though I can accept them if done for striking artistic effect). I have tried doing HDRs in the past without understanding the technique and got horrible results.

During my last trip to Italy I have attempted creating a few HDR pictures where the tonal range was simply too wide for my D7100 sensor. This time, when processing them in Phtoshop/Nik plugins I tried to make them look as natural as possible. Here are a few examples.


In the first picture the snow on top of the mountains was burned in a single exposure, so I tried to keep then in check in this HDR. In the hindsight, I probably should have kept the shadows a bit darker, as they give the HDR away.


The bright clouds and the dark foreground created too much contrast, so I had to compress it. I tried to avoid extracting too many details and keep the picture natural.


In this late evening photo the shadows at the bottom were very dark in a single exposure. I tried to keep them darkish, but with details visible.


This, hopefully, looks like a single exposure. The only thing that didn't fit here was the stained glass window, which was burned, so I combined thee exposures, again trying to keep the interior of the church looking like a single exposure.


The last one is probably the most obvious one. It was taken against the sun and the tonal range was huge. I wonder what you thing about this attempt.

I like them all... none really look over the top... Nice Job!

Pat in NH

As Pat said, all of them are looking great. I love them all.

Great HDRs! I get so frustrated when when looking on scenic photos usually, as it seems to be the trend to use super pumped up HDRs, which mostly just looks horrible. Your subtle approach I like, however. Nice work

They all look fine to me.

With a lot of DR in the D7100 sensor, try to expose for the brightest - snow, clouds etc, and then recover the shadows. That will give a much more natural look.

The current Nikon sensors are very much capable of doing the types of shots you have here (very nice, btw) with a single shot. I did an HDR thread where I used a single frame of a sunrise from my D7000 (previous generation to yours), grabbing a frame that was largely too dark but exposed properly for the sun, and then used LR and PS to pull out the details in the dark areas. The results were largely indistinguishable from the 3 photo HDR series it came from. The D7100 sensor is even better, so even if you don't shoot for HDR, the information you have in those RAW files are completely capable of giving you HDR-like results, and without the impact of ghosting and merging of separate images.

very nice pictures....love the contrast!

Nice job! They look great!

Thank you for your kind comments.

I know that the D7100 sensor has a great dynamic range, and I've been impressed by it since I bought the camera a few months ago. But I didn't realise how much details it keeps in the shadows. When I looked at the underexposed version of picture #2 in my original post (if anything, clouds are underexposed in this bracket), I though that darks were definitely too dark and if I try to extract anything from them I well get a lot of noise:



This is why I went for HDR in the first place. However, after your comments I decided to give it a go. After some tweaking in ViewNX2 and then in NIK plugins, this is what I got:



Well, you learn something all the time! Honestly, I didn't expect to get that much from such a dark picture. This is as good as the HDR above. There are tiny differences between these two pictures, the HDR has more details, but I could use detail extractor from ColorEffex to obtain a similar effect, if I wanted to. The only real difference is in the level of noise in darker parts:





The HDR is at the top and the single exposure at the bottom. But this is really pixel picking. Even on my retina MacBook Pro screen the single exposure picture looks great in full-screen view.

Next time, I will think twice before I get into HDR.

Great dynamic range, you say. That,s why we buy Nikons.

Yes, HDR ensures that the dark areas are relatively noise free, but then noise in the dark portions really does not matter much. Most of the time a single shot is good enough.

Some might argue that not all the dark is supposed to be pulled out as shadows and shades lend a realistic dynamic to a scene that is often lost in the flat light of HDR, even when done with an eye towards realism. When I see the extra noise in the 100% crops above I also see lighter tones with the noise and think, "The shadow got pulled beyond where they were supposed to". The real test is to take the -3EV exposure and simply add back the 3EV and see the differences. I suspect that you'll only find them in scenes where the light variation is extreme.