Comments on: Some HDR Required – or maybe not…

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:25:08 +0000

Although I have been trying HDR more lately – I couldn’t agree more with your points here Gary. It is not always a successful method of processing. On my recent Alaska trip, I shot several scenes with the intention of processing them as HDR. However, for many of them – I liked one of the single straight exposures much better than the blended one.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 02:21:34 +0000

I agree with you. I’ve tried doing HDR with not much success. I had been doing manual blends before the HDR hype skyrocketed and like you, have been horrified by some of the results. I still prefer doing manual blends and also prefer yours as well.

By: Patrick Smith

Patrick Smith — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 01:38:35 +0000

I’ll go with the left one too. But I will add that on the HDR’s that I’ve done, I always process them conservatively as you did on the right and then bring it into Photoshop and make contrast adjustments there. I bet you could make the right one look like the left one (possibly better) with a extra few minutes of processing.

I put ‘No HDR’ on every Flickr upload for the reasons you mention, but the problem is that Flickr indexes all words in the description. So if you search for ‘HDR’ and order by interestingness, I have 4 on the first page out of 1.5 million and dozens on the first several pages. If you enter ‘california HDR’ I have 31 of the top 35. Then I get about 10 people every day saying ‘Nice HDR!’

Now that is frustrating!

Patrick

By: Michael Frye

Michael Frye — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 01:31:36 +0000

Nice comparison. The image on the left is clearly better. One of the problems with blending exposures, whether with HDR or manually in Photoshop, is that you can lose local contrast – which clearly happened in the right-hand photo. Your manual blend retained this local contrast. I’ve compared HDR and manual Photoshop blends in many of my own images, and usually like the Photoshop blends better, but I’ve encountered a few exceptions. The effects of HDR are hard to predict, but are sometimes better. Like John Wall above, I recently discovered LR Enfuse and have been pleasantly surprised by the excellent results. It’s not HDR, but an automated blending algorithm. Photomatix also has an exposure blending mode, but I’ve been more impressed with LR Enfuse.

By: Ron Niebrugge

Ron Niebrugge — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:27:22 +0000

I prefer the left image by a lot.

I tend to do manual blends for my HDR work as well – looks more natural.