Treescape

[CanonChrissy]

Had a mess about with HDR. No experience really and just experimenting. I merged 4 images for this, then applied HDR toning. Is it too much saturation? It was the sky that made me pick this one to experiment on.

[colinb]

Chrissy I don't really see the point of HDR with a scene like this and would have thought a single RAW file would give as good if not better result. On the up side its not 'over cooked' and the tree edges don't have the usual giveaway edges.

[CanonChrissy]

Cheers Colin..im experimenting with what kind of images work best as hdr. Any tips?

[Guest]

Chrissy, HDR can be used in two ways.  There is the sort of image that became popular a few years ago where HDR is used to produce an effect , a treatment if you like, that gives you a particular sort of finish.  It is usually achieved using specialist software such as Photomatix but there are others.  It's not to everyone's taste and some are more successful than others.  A Blackpool photographer has IMHO, been more successful than most and you can view the sort of image that he has considered suitable on his Web Site at Chromasia.com.  An example of the sort of image he produces is the shot of Blackpool Tower in his Fylde Coast portfolio under "Photography".

An HDR approach (depends on your definition of HDR) can also be used to produce a natural looking image for scenes in which the dynamic range is beyond what the camera can cope with, e.g. say a lighthouse against a much brighter sky at dusk.  Here you can use multiple exposures and combine them, each exposure metered for different parts of the image i. e. for the shadows , for the mid tones and for the highlights.  You can then combine them either manually in your editing software by stacking the and cutting through to the image that gives the best result for a particular area or automatically, using PS CC /Lr or even some of the specialist software that have a "natural" setting available.  I use SNS Pro which has this and incidentally, which avoids some of the more extreme finishes that say Photomatics produces.

Hope this is helpful.

 

[CanonChrissy]

wow...very. thanks.