Harry Limey wrote:
To interrupt this nonsensical dialogue with Hebee Jeebes!! ( I supposed they were all HDR by the way, as they all look rather too good to be standard images and Hebee Jeebes does not seem to be answering your challenge!!)
None are standard images in the way that they are just one shot, that is true. But not all are HDR either. I’ve used masking techniques for some and that’s exactly the point: you can’t see the difference between the two methods, because there doesn’t have to be a difference if you know how to use HDR properly.
I have to say, they all look really good to me, they capture the ambience of the rooms well, which I suppose is the very object of the exercise!! I wonder if you would care to pass on any of your trade secrets!!!
If I have time, I will add another tutorial to my site about HDR, but for the time being this is what I found:
Most people try to ‘get it right’ directly in the interface you get when you go from HDR back to 16 bits. That often gives the results that look ‘3D’ or ‘painting’. I use a different approach, where I do as little as possible in the HDR -> 16 bits conversion. When doing this conversion, I’m only concerned with the highlights and the shadows. They have to be right, meaning they both must have detail. Everything else can be fixed later in the 16 bits image, because then I have all the Photoshop tools I need to improve the image.
A second observation is that the defaults for the most powerful method (Local Adaptation) are wrong. The microcontrast settings (Radius and Threshold) defaults are almost always too high. If I use this method, I use settings like a Radius of 10 or less and a Threshold of 0.1 or something like that. This avoids that ‘3D’ look. It does give a softer image with not too much detail, but that problem can be solved later by sharpening. And as Hebee Jeebes confirmed, this works so well that he thinks the resulting detail is too high for a real photograph! Go figure. 😉
BTW: many people claim that PhotoMatix does a better job than Photoshop, but I disagree. I think Photoshop gives far more natural results if you use these settings.
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Johan W. Elzenga johan<<at>>johanfoto.nl Editor / Photographer
http://www.johanfoto.nl