More HDR Fun!

[Ben]

OK, so I did break down yesterday and bought Photomatix Pro for HDR image creation. Luckily, my boss came in and saw us playing with it and asked if I was going to use it at the office. I said, yes, and he told me to put in the paperwork to get reimbursed the $!20. Boo-yah!!

So...here's another example of what HDR can do. The hospital that I work in opened up a new lobby this past August and I got a call from the Marketing Dept. to come down and take a few photos before the ribbon cutting and that the pic needed to go to a magazine. Oh...and I had 20 minutes to take the photos and get them an image to give to the magazine reporter. So I ran down, took some hand-held images, and ran back to the office.

Here's one of the shots they used. Nothing fancy - there just wasn't any time.





So this morning I decided to experiment with that image. I opened it in PS and set the levels to overexpose the shot by about 3 stops. Here it is:





Then I brought the two images into Photomatix Pro and here's what I got with, literally, no tweaking:





This is a MAJOR improvement to my original quickie image - and - it didn't take much time at all. I certainly could have done this using my original 20 minute deadline.

Then in Photomatix I made another one using on of their filters called Grunge. A very cool effect, but too much. So in PS I knocked down the saturation and got this image - which is actually my favorite version of the photograph. It looks more like an architectural rendering.





Then that one got turned into a B/W image using the PS black & white tools.



Gotta love Photoshop! You could spend a lifetime figuring out stuff to do with it. But I'm also loving Photomatix Pro and HDR. Even with my limited experience with it so far, HDR is opening up a whole new dimension to my own image making.

-Ben

[Warren]

I've played around a little with HDR. I do have Photomatix Pro and have used it with varying results both with multiple bracketed exposures and using a single raw file. It's an interesting tool but I think it works best when subtlety applied, many folks overdo it and the resulting images look too surreal. Another technique I've tried is simple contrast masking using PhotoShop and that produces some pretty good results also.

I like your results, especially the B&W, the grainy look that photomatix produces looks good in B&W.

[Ben]

Nov 11, 2009 8:37:57 GMT -6 Warren said:

I've played around a little with HDR. I do have Photomatix Pro and have used it with varying results both with multiple bracketed exposures and using a single raw file. It's an interesting tool but I think it works best when subtlety applied, many folks overdo it and the resulting images look too surreal. Another technique I've tried is simple contrast masking using PhotoShop and that produces some pretty good results also.

I like your results, especially the B&W, the grainy look that photomatix produces looks good in B&W.

Thanks, Warren. I agree with you. The watchword is "subtle." Some of the results you get can be pretty garish. The trick is figuring out which one of the Tone Mapping algorithms to follow - Details Enhancer or Tone Compressor. The latter seems to keep the images as photographs and the Details Enhancer seems more surreal.

Big files, though. Whew! I made print of the "filtered" version of the image above (#4). The original was a 21 megapixel RAW file (Canon 5D Mark II) and at 300 DPI and 14 x 20 inches the file size is 140 MB.

Remember when you could get 100 images on a floppy disk?

-Ben

[CHIP]

I always wanted to try that software, but I never had 120 that had absolutely no other purpose in life.

The more I see it though, the more I get the itch for it.

[CHIP]

Another thing that held me back is that you can pretty much do all of the same stuff in PS. It just takes a little bit longer.



I did this using PS 7.0 (that's all I have at work) and it took about 5 minutes using your original image. (and I missed some areas on the back wall, which are a bit overexposed in my image)

On my monitor, looks very close to what Photomatix came up with.

Original image... duplicate layer.... type screen... add mask... 30% opacity on some areas, 60 percent on others, depending on over exposure. Unsharp mask on the screen layer.

The second version is pretty cool and that one would take a while to do in Photoshop so I'm not even gonna try.

[Warren]

Remember when you could get 100 images on a floppy disk?

-Ben

I remember buying a 300MB hard drive for around $300 back in the mid eighties. Your file would've used up $140 worth of it.

[Ben]

Nov 11, 2009 10:29:14 GMT -6 CHIP said:

Another thing that held me back is that you can pretty much do all of the same stuff in PS. It just takes a little bit longer.

I did this using PS 7.0 (that's all I have at work) and it took about 5 minutes using your original image. (and I missed some areas on the back wall, which are a bit overexposed in my image)

On my monitor, looks very close to what Photomatix came up with.

Original image... duplicate layer.... type screen... add mask... 30% opacity on some areas, 60 percent on others, depending on over exposure. Unsharp mask on the screen layer.

The second version is pretty cool and that one would take a while to do in Photoshop so I'm not even gonna try.

Your version looks pretty good, and this is what I would have normally done with it. But, I guess I didn't mention that I didn't have 20 minutes for this one shot. I had 20 minutes for 10 shots. Sheesh...seems like we always get called when it's a rush and have to clean up other folks' non-planning.

Photomatix did the image in about 5 seconds! Did you look at the watch photos in my last post on HDR? It definitely makes like easier, but HDR seems to work best on more 3D kinds of images - landscapes, etc.

[Warren]

Ben when I read your post the part about the grunge filter got me thinking, "what grunge filter? I don't have any grunge filter!" then I realized that I never upgraded fro 3.0 to 3.2. So thanks to you I'm now up to date.

[Ben]

Nov 11, 2009 13:54:48 GMT -6 Warren said:

Ben when I read your post the part about the grunge filter got me thinking, "what grunge filter? I don't have any grunge filter!" then I realized that I never upgraded fro 3.0 to 3.2. So thanks to you I'm now up to date.

Cool. I'm glad you got the upgrade. I assume it was free.

I just got pretty good book on how to use HDR. It's:

Complete Guide to High Dynamic Range Digital Photography by Ferrell McCollough

Lots of good stuff in it.

-Ben

[atomic]

Looks good Ben, and Chip... like really good.

I'd like to venture into HDR a bit.

[Ben]

Nov 20, 2009 8:03:49 GMT -6 atomic said:

Looks good Ben, and Chip... like really good.

I'd like to venture into HDR a bit.

Thanks, John.

Incidentally, I showed the print of the version that looks like an architectural rendering to one of the Marketing Dept's graphic designers and she thought it looked great.

In fact she said that they were starting to work on a project with the Development Dept. (they raise money through donations and fundraisers to build and renovate). They're going to be doing a whole new booklet and such for them and that the image style would be perfect. She thought it was really cool that photographs of actual new additions looked like renderings.

So...it looks like we're going to be getting a whole new gig out of this. We're going to photograph more new areas on the campuses and create a portfolio of images. I've already gone back to the new Atrium and made more HDR images. Cool, huh?

-Ben