OK I’ve actually no idea what this ‘thing’ is, hence the title, and I like Harry Potter. I was walking by and it looked photo worthy so I clicked away with my trusty D300, although when I look at the photo and try to think of what the subject might be, the word ‘carousel’ comes to mind. But I’m sure that’s not it.
This photo came out slightly bland so I ran it through GIMP afterwards and fiddled with the curves to give it a little extra UMPH, as you do.
So c’mon, who’s gonna tell me what this thing is? If your site is even remotely in a similar field as mine I’ll stick you on my blogroll as a reward - first come first served! (Update: Gilbert was first with the answer - he doesn’t have a photography website so here’s his Twitter page)!
On my way up from Drogheda to Dublin for some Christmas shopping over the holidays I thought some shots of my local train station would present some interesting photographs - unfortunately it was overcast as hell (and dark) that morning so I missed out on the classic ’sun splitting the clouds’ scene that always makes HDR photos so surreal (I don’t care much for realistic/proper HDR). Anywho, the juxtaposition of the rather depressing sky and the wall light catched my eye than, and maybe yours now?
02 Jan
All, Distorted Images, Dublin, High Dynamic Range, Photography, Photomatix
I find this image very soothing - I was walking over a rock bridge (part of it is the foreground), and the frame that the bridge and trees make around the lake made this shot irresistable to take. I’ve used a low aperture number, F/3.5 I think, to reduce the depth of focus as much as possible and give it a sort of fairy tale look. I hope you like it.
In a previous post I mentioned that I would do a comparison between Photomatix Pro and some new software called HDR Max. Here we go!
Photomatix Pro works great for me under certain lighting conditions - on clear days when the sun is out I am able to get great shots that I am really happy with (such as this one and this one). Unfortuantely I haven’t got the hang of Photomatix under cloudy conditions - my images turn out seriously bland. With that in mind I wanted to compare Photomatix against HDR Max under bad lighting i.e. ugly clouds dominating the sky. I chose a picture of a fountain that you can see in Stephen’s Green in Dublin.
For each software I tweaked the setting until I was satisfied with them - I didn’t apply the same settings to both or anything like that - I just played around until I was happy. (Playing is the best way to getting anything done I think.) The first image below is from HDR Max, the second is Photomatix. You can see I couldn’t get very good results with Photomatix, and ordinarily I wouldn’t post an image like this, but HDR Max worked wonderfully and turned out much much better: more vibrant, smoother tones, fewer halos, and more true to life. (I ran both through GIMP to fiddle with curves also.)
One major problem I had with HDR Max thougth was saving. Regardless of whether I chose jpg or TIFF, the saved image always turned out terrible - mountains of information was being lossed during saving. The image I’ve posted here for HDR Max was actually screen captured and cropped! This is not only annoying as hell but means I can’t save at full 4320×2868 resolution! Does anyone else have this problem? (Actually this may be happening because it’s the trial version I’m using.)
Anyway this has been a long post and it’s time to wrap it up - in my book HDR Max wins hands down, but then again I’ve always sucked at getting good results in bad weather condtions with Photomatix. I’ll do another comparision in the new year with an image taken under some wonderful, sun splitting through the clouds like god’s loving stare, weather conditions.
HDR Max: The clear winner!
Photomatix Pro: Grrrr, just wait ’till Round Two!
They’re not really endless tress but I couldnt think of any other title. Actually I wonder how anyone comes up with post titles. Are they an arbitrary decision or is an abundance of time put into each post name. Mmmm I better name some hot keywords before I go: I used my Nikon D300 and five exposures at f-stops of ±2, ±1, and metered, to make this high dynamic range (hdr) photo. I used Photomatix Pro and Gimp to postprocess the images. There, that’s enough I think.
Technorati Tags: Nikon, D300, high dynamic range, hdr, Photomatix, Gimp, glenomena, ucd, university college dublin
26 Dec
All, Dublin, High Dynamic Range, Nature, Photography, Photomatix
Humans appear to put themselves under a massive amount of stress, all the time - some dash from point A to point B for something they think is very important, but in fact isn’t very important at all. Equally, others dash from point B to point A for something they think is as equally important, but is in fact as equally unimportant. Often they worry about getting stuck at point C while dashing from point A to point B, or point B to point A. Point C is any point in between points A and B.
My point is people should just relax more, like these ducks, which I present here. They are in the background at the side of the pond and don’t really feature heavily at all. I’m not sure what this post was even about.
Three cheers goes to whomever knows where the inspiration for the first paragraph comes from.
Technorati Tags: ucd lake, ucd, university college dublin
Now this is the natural stance of this tree; there was no wind blowing when I took this shot. It’s a paradox in my opinion - on one hand the trunk is leaning to the right, indicating that the wind blows from the left, but looking at the leaves and branches the situation is reversed! In any case I love the overall shape the tree has - beat that anyone!
Click for larger resolution image.
My Very First Impressions of the Nikon D300
First Nikon D300 Image
UCD Library In The Morning
Blue Sky Swirls
I always seem to take wide angle shots of landscapes or general openness / so today I decided for something different. Ivy grows in abundance around my campus but if you don’t look down once in a while you wold never see it. I’m terrible for overlooking the macro shots in nature - here’s some of my few attempts. Not close enough?
Click for larger resolution image.
My Very First Impressions of the Nikon D300
First Nikon D300 Image
UCD Library In The Morning
Blue Sky Swirls
This is me again trying to be creative in how I capture a scene. In every picture there are lines but I never really noticed until recently. Here I’ve lined up the horizon diagonal with the picture frame and the pathway bo be aligned vertically with the frame.
Click for larger resolution image.
My Very First Impressions of the Nikon D300
First Nikon D300 Image
UCD Library In The Morning
Blue Sky Swirls
I remember taking a shot of this scene once before but was never happy with it (check it out here). So I took another stab at it with my Nikon this time, hoping for something a bit different. I threw in the angle because I was a little bored just shooting straight ahead as per usual. You have to experiment if you’re going to grow as a person. So what do you think? An improvement over the last? Or do you prefer the ultra high temperatures of the original?
Click for larger resolution image.
My Very First Impressions of the Nikon D300
First Nikon D300 Image
UCD Library In The Morning
Blue Sky Swirls
I’ll write a little about this photo in a few hours - right now I’m in the middle of making Guinness Stew… well that was nice, now on with the show. There’s one rather unique spot on my campus near its library where lights have been installed along rows of plants and on overhead balcony connecting the library to another building. I had to try out my D300 here so I brought it over alog with my gorrilla pod and took a metered shot along with two under- and two overexposed shots (±2EV). Like my first post on using the D300, I did nothing to optimise the settings (excepts setting aperture priority). I’m slowly reading through the D300 manual so over time I should become more familiar with all it’s wonderful abilities but for the immediate future I will continue taking shots in its default settings (or near enough to default) and post them here daily.
Click for larger resolution image.Yesterday I bought a Nikon D300 with the Nikkor 18-200mm VR lens for a rather hefty €2000. Being a bit overwhelmed by the plethora of settings available on it I decided the best thing to do was head out and take some shots with the camera in its default settings. This was just to see how it shoots. I wanted to create some High Dynamic Range pictures so I looked a little into the D300’s auto-bracketing features. Equipped with my new knowledge I headed out this morning at 7am (It was freezing and still pitch dark) to wander around my campus grounds. Below is the one shot I took - five exposures using the D300’s interval timer functions. For this shot I left absolutely everything the way it way when I took it out of the box - I didn’t set any aperture, shutter speed, manual focus, white balance, I didn’t check any histogram, I just wanted to see what the camera would do on the fly. I also left the lens to swirl about and choose its own focal length. I’m currently at a loss as to how the lens aperture is set; the body aperture setting ranges from F3.5 to F22 but the lens is only for F3.5 - F5.6 so I’m not sure what’s going on there yet. Maybe setting the aperture on the body will set the lens aperture also?
Click on image for 1200×797 pixel resolution
I’m pretty happy the way this photo came out - it was very dark when I took these exposures yet the tone mapping is applied quite evenly. I had set the camera to take 14bit uncompressed NEF files, I’ll be experimenting with 12bit uncompressed and 12bit lossless compressed etc to see what difference each one gives. If you want to buy a camera I suggest right now that the D300 should be top of your list!
I’ll say this right out. There are no best settings. It’s personal preference. Right, post over, goodbye.
You’re still here? OK maybe I should elaborate on my first statement. I’m not going to talk about the theory behind HDR, nearly everyone has an idea of what is meant by it - greater tonal range is my interpretation. To complicate the matter slightly though, there are two main HDR opinion camps. Camp 1 interprets HDR as photos that realistically recreate what the eye saw when the picture was taken, and I would agree that this is technically what HDR is, or was originally about. There is a Camp 2 however, who say that HDR is all about creating photos with blown out colours, imposing skies and acid fuelled backgrounds. Personally I prefer a little towards the over the top surreal side of things and so it is in that respect I will talk about what I think are the best settings for Photomatix.
1. Strength.
I usually use the Strength slider in conjunction with Colour Saturation as by itself it seems to do little, at least for my purposes. With Strength at 100% a Colour Saturation of 0% will give you a black & white image and the histogram will shift far to the left. As a personal rule I would leave the Strength between 70% and 90%. It works in most situations.
2. Colour Saturation.
This is an obvious one; if you want your pictures to jump with vibrancy then crank this up near 100%. At 100% saturation vibrancy can be increasesd more by dropping the Strength slider down to 50% - 60% if you wish.
3. Light Smoothing.
If you want over the top halos in your images then you should set this very low. Personally I would set it to either Medium or High - it gives a more gradual change in the lighting across boundaries e.g. tree lines, horizons etc. So, Low = More Halos and darker colours, High = Less Halos, more realistic colour tones and shadows.
4. Tone - Luminosity.
Increasing the Luminosity will, unsurprisingly, increase the brightness of your image, but will also highlight any noise that may be present, especially in skies or any other large single colour area. One tip to overcome this problem, and something I do often, is to reduce the Luminosity incrementally while increasing the Gamma levels by the same increment until you are happy with the light levels. The Gamma will mask the noise better while still giving plenty of lighting.
5. Tone - White / Black Point.
I almost never even touch these but you can bump them up to the right if you want some extra contrast in your super HDR’s.
6. Tone - Gamma.
I’ve mentioned Gamma before, if noise isn’t a problem then decreasing the Gamma will darken your image and bring out more shadows, giving the whole scene are much darker mood. Don’t go too high with this though - all the colour will become washed out and will actually look quite sickening. DON’T DO IT!
7. Colour - Temperature.
Another obvious one - increasing the temperature will overlay hotter colours like yellows, oranges and reds through your image, giving it a warm feel. Conversely decreasing the temperature will add more blues to your image. I usually leave it at about +2 or +3 unless I’m looking to express a particular mood in a picture.
8. Colour - Saturation Highlights.
I leave this at default 99% or the time - it seems to do very little for me.
9. Colour - Saturation Shadows.
Again, 99% of the time I just leave it at default. I might play with it to see if it improves anything but it generally does very little.
10. Micro - Microcontrast.
I like the colour of every little feature (e.g the cobbles on roads, leaves, bricks, crevices in doorways) to contrast against one another so I almost always crank the microcontrast all the way up to +10. Lets face it; a HDR should jump out at you and scream “WOW!” Setting the Microcontrast too low will just reduce the relative intensity in your colours and wash out the while scene.
11. Micro - Mocrosmoothing.
It you like Microcontrast you’ll hate Microsmoothing - I set this one to its minimum value. I don’t want anything to be smoothed out when I’m making a HDR.
12. S/H - Hightlights Smoothing.
Leave it at minimum. (Again, this is my preference, just because it smooths out highlights). If you prefer to smooth highlights out, by all means find your preferred setting.
13. S/H - Hightlights Smoothing.
More smoothing?! Minimise it!
14. S/H - Shadows Clipping.
Increasing the Shadow Clipping will give more prominence to any shadowing that is already in your image and can increase it visual impact. e.g. if you want to exaggerate the level of shadowing that is within a landscape shot. If you set it too high though then everything will become a shadow!
So they are all the settings in Photomatix. I’ve intentionally not included any images to illustrate these settings for this post as the settings are not independent of each other. So for example if I showed two images highlight the difference between high and low strength, this difference would itself be different, depending on what level colour saturation, microcontrast, temperature etc was set at. I think it’s better if you have your own photo open in Photomatix; you can then go through this post changing the settings you feel it will help get your picture the way you want it. I should be buying the Nikon D300 tomorrow (and I can not wait to use its auto-bracketing since the S9600 has none in RAW mode, and DSLR sounds so much cooler than bridge camera), so I’m sure I’ll do a detailed post on these settings specifically with the D300 and auto-bracketing in mind. Ciao.
Technorati Tags: HDR, Photomatix, Nikon, D300, S9600, RAW, DSLR, tone mapping, high dynamic range
HDR photography has become quite popular in recent years. Some people like the over the top trippy acid looking results one can get with Photomatix (although Photomatix isn’t limited to this), while others prefer the greater flexibility and reputed more realistic results that can be got from Photoshop. To help yourself, and myself, see how weblogs approach HDR I’ve put together a list of 22 tutorials / guides that explain the process, from the basic drag and drop approaches to the more complicated post-processes one can do following tonemapping. Some of these guides you may have seen before, others are less popular, but they all offer something new for everyone.
1. Vanilla Days
This is a very popular HDR tutorial and compares the capabilities of Photoshop against Photomatix, concluding that Photomatix gives more control over the final image. It explains the essentials - auto-bracketing, merging and tone mapping. What makes this tutorial stand out from others is that is explains in good detail the tone mapping options available in Photomatix and provides results for different Photomatix settings. It also makes a lot of comparisons: using 1 RAW versus 3 RAWS, using jpgs instead of RAWS and direct comparisons between Photoshop and Photomatix. If you’re interested in creating HDRs this tutorials should definitely be in your bookmarks.
2. PopPhoto
This post, by Jack Howard, is a whopping 11 pages long and explains pretty much everything you need to know about putting together HDRs. With such depth you expect to gleam some nuggets of information - I knew Photomatix had exposure blending capabilities but I didn’t realise how limited they actually were until I read this. Like before, Photomatix and Photoshop are compared and the strengths and weaknesses of both are listed; quite useful if you’re in two minds over which one to buy. At the end of this tutorial there is a useful tips page listing a methodology for producing the best HDRs possible.
3. BackingWinds
Backing Winds is a blog maintained by Ryan McGinnis. He shows us how to create realistic looking HDRs using Photoshop - and definitely a guy whose against the ‘misuse’ that often occurs when creating HDRs with Photomatix (see a post of mine for an example!). His post is a great resource for anyone interested in using Photoshop, simply because it’s such a huge package and is less accessible than Photomatix - it’s very easy to be overwhelmed by Photoshops 19000 options! Ryan also give some pointer on adding those crucial finishing touches using Histogram and curve adjustments - very useful!
4. GrindGod
GrindGod has a very well layout guide, starting from the top with telling us the equipment we need to get started before getting into more detail with the various options that Photomatix provides. One flaw with this guide however is that there are no images describing the steps or showing any HDR examples.
5. CameraLabs
CameraLabs is a forum and this is simply a post on it, but it’s one heck of a post! The interesting thing about this post is that it was the guys first attempt, and it’s a very good one! There are pictures to go with every step also so it’s very easy to follow. The actual settings are shown so you have some benchmark settings that should work reasonably well to start with. This is a great tutorial for novices; however because it’s a posting on a forum there’s no guarantee that it will remain there long term - sometimes forum topics or posts can be removed either by the administration or the poster so if you find this guide useful it would be worthwhile saving it to your computer.
6. The 23x Blog
Another good tutorial, it has nothing new over the five previous ones but hey, it’s good to check out it’s work if HDR is your passion! It does have some great results - I love the photo of the boats (right) that is shown on the site. Right now I dream of being able to make a photo this good! It gives some essential tips such as using the same aperture for each shot - a lot of other tutorials seem to overlook this point. The author also has a link to their Flickr page where you can see more images.
7. Popsci
This guide has over 1500 Diggs since May 2007 so has proven very popular. It first describes what exactly a HDR image is, before showing us the differently exposed thumbnails that will be used for the final image. It then describes the two main programs used to create the HDR: Photoshop and Photomatix before describing a little what tone mapping is and finally comparing the original photo to the final tone mapped image. It also comments on an open source alternative, Qtpfsgui, available on Windows, MAC OSX and Linux.
8. Digital Camera Resource Page
This is another guide posting on a forum. It highlights the problem many people will have if they are creating HDR images from multiple RAW files - aligning of the source files. According to the guide Photomatix cannot align wide angle shots very well and so it recommends using a program called PTGui. It will warp and align each picture to match up perfectly with each other - handy if you don’t have a tripod nearby! The guide is quite detailed - it provides the original under- metered and over-exposed images, it provides the settings used to create the HDR and explains how the settings in Photomatix affect the final results - a good tutorial to check out.
9. Cambridge In Colour
Cambridge In Colour explains why increasing the dynamic range of your photography is a good thing, when and where the technique should be applied as well as some of the trade off that you will encounter by taking the HDR approach. Many people (myself included) treat HDR-esque post-processing as a black box; images go into Photomatix, HDR comes out followed by tone mapping. Cambridge In Colour delves behind the scenes and explains very well the mechanisms of HDR - well worth the read if you want to sound all knowledgeable on the topic :).
10. NatureScapes
This isn’t so much a traditional guide as it is a book on the topic! You can download a 49 page pdf of this guide; well worth having saved to disk. It covers every aspect you could ask for: What is HDR?, Setting Up Input Images, Processing a Single Frame HDR Image and Processing Multiple Frame HDR Images. The HTML version also provides a gallery of very good HDR images towards the end that’s worth checking out. By the way the book is free so you’ve really got no excuse not to check it out!
11. PhotoShop Support
This is an advanced tutorial in Photoshop - for those of use used to the black box approach of Photomatix, be prepared for a challenge! The main focus of this tutorial is overcoming the problem of combining images in which subjects in the images have moved between different exposures. This is achieved using smart objects. There’s quite a bit of manual work involved (oh No!) but it gives you more flexibility in the long run when you are post-processing your hard days shots.
12. Duane Storey
A quick tutorial with a great subject (see right) this guide uses Photomatix to create a great scene of the Vancouver skyline. Five images were used to make the final image and from what I can gather from the guide, the HDR was made using jpg images - very impressive!.
13. Abduzeedo
Abduzeedo uses a simple subject to get a very color rich final result. There are plenty of illustrations to go with this tutorial as well so there’s no way you’ll get lost while using it. It’s also the first guide I’ve seen where a HDR was made from a compact camera, showing that high end DSLR’s are not essential for getting good results.
14. Thoughts From My Life
Thoughts from my life uses an interesting subject and Photoshops Merge To HDR options. Any photos taken indoors that have windows in them usually suffer from overexposure of whatever can be seen through the window - Thoughts From My Life shows how HDR can overcome this problem.
15. WebDesign Library
Here’s yet another site that uses Photoshop to create the HDR image from three differently exposed RAW pictures, followed by tone mapping in Photomatix to jazz up the final shot.
16. Easy HDR
EasyHDR is a piece of software I just came across while writing this post. I haven’t used it so can’t say much but the website gives a very comprehensive guide to all its functions and the illustrations of
HDRed photos look very impressive.
17. Slager Man Photo
Slager Man Photo shows the difference between the histogram of a regular picture and that of a HDR, something I’ve not seen anywhere else. They also have a link to a small gallery at the bottom of the guide of some seriously wacky looking sunsets!
18. Visual Photo Guide
This guide is quick and to the point - no padding. Some settings for your camera are recommended and how to set them on a Nikon D50 (the camera used for this tutorial) is explained. There’s also a link to a HDR video tutorial.
19. Picture Correct
Picture Correct throws together a little personal story to go with their guide - a nice touch. It uses only two images - one overexposed and one underexposed to get really good results. Layer masks are used as one choice to blend the photos so if you enjoy working with them then this guide is for you.
20. Grumpy Editors Guide To HDR
Every site I’ve listed so far has assumed that you are either using a windows or a mac machine, but what if you use Linux instead? Well then this tutorial is for you: it mentions OpenEXR, PFScalibration and Qtpfsgui as Linux HDR solutions. Tone mapping is then achieved with Qpfstmo (I’ve no idea why such strange names are used, if they give results then that all that matters.)
21. Digital Photography School
Digial Photography School is a very popular photography site and for many is the first choice of all photo related information on the internet. This guide is a guest post from Pixelens.com. It talks about the essentials, and compares Photomatix to less known programs (to me at least) such as the Photoshop plugin ReDynaMix. It also compares the difference in using different number of exposures and how much of a difference there is between using a single RAW and multiple RAWS.
22. Stuck In Customs
Stuck In Customs is a site by Tray Ratcliff, home to some of the most amazing HDR photographs I’ve ever seen. Seriously his work is world class and is the standard everyone should aspire to. From what I’ve seen he deals mostly with the surreal HDR look rather than the realistic look but you should check out his work to really see what can be done if you know how. It’s likely you’ve seen his work on plenty other sites - any list of “Amazing HDR Photographs” will likely contain more than one of his works.
After looking through these guides I feel rather humbled by my own efforts. I guess the saying is true - the more you know about a topic the more you realise how little you know.
Technorati Tags: HDR, photography, Photomatix, Photoshop, tonemapping, auto-bracketing, RAW, Qtpfsgui, PTGui
This post is a quick follow up to my post on which single exposure range is best for making HDR-esque photographs. Rather than using a single exposure range (e.g. ±1, or ±2, or ±3), most people will use multiple exposure ranges to capture the entire range of lights and darks in a scene. Using multiple exposures seems the most sensible route to take anyway - heading out with your camera and taking one metered photo along with a single under- and over-exposed image may limit your post processing possibilities, so it’s best to take as many as reasonably possible. Note I didn’t take multiple shots of the photo below - I didn’t even take the photo! The different exposure are simply from adjusting the exposure levels in photoshop and saving as TIFFS. I really have to begin using auto-bracketing!
1. HDR Of The Metered Photo and ±1, ±2 Exposures
If you’ve seen the first post then you know how the metered photo and ±2 EV looks. Using ±1 and ±2 exposures gives more detail in the clouds, they almost look painted on, but the building looks slightly more washed out. Also the lighting across the building is pretty uneven for some reason. There is however more detail in the ripples of the water.
2. HDR Of The Metered Photo and ±1, ±2, ±3 Exposures
The lighting across the building is slightly more even, however some areas of the sky are becoming washed out due to the very overexposed area of the +3 exposure. This is something to be careful when using overexposed images - there’s no need to go so overexposed the entire image is washed out. Thumbs of the different exposures can be seen in the first post - in retrospect the ±3 and ±4 exposures are probably too under- and over exposed.
3. HDR Of The Metered Photo and ±1, ±2, ±3, ±4 Exposures
I don’t like this result, plain and simple - too many areas are washed out and there is nothing in it that improves over earlier efforts. There’s nothing more to say on it.
Related Articles:
Tutorial To Create A High Dynamic Range Photo (HDR) From A Single RAW Image.
Creating Ultra Vibrant Tone-Mapped Surreal HDR Photos With Photomatix Pro
What Is The Best Exposure Range For HDR Photos? Part I
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