HDR / Discussions

I use photomatix for the merging and tonemapping and i use photoshop to retouch.

What kind of results are you after ? and what kind of results have you been getting ? ...

hum... I used FDR-Tools... and the pictures I got are too .. how do I say... there is not enough "black". The colours are nice, but the really dark parts are gone, so there is too less contrast. The darkest colour was a dark brown or sth. like that.
The picture looked nice, somehow different than the best original, but not "better"....
So compared, I had an original (the best exposed) that was "ok", a HDR (out of 3 or 5 differently exposed pictures) that showed softer detail and nice bright colours, but not enough darkness, or a photoshop-edited HDR with increased dark parts, but then the nice softer and brighter colours from the HDR are somewhat destroyed.

www.ipernity.com/doc/szandor/1274842 that is the "best" original I made.
The HDR showed some greenish-blue-dark sky (not bad) but too greybrown where the houses are and the street... all with little contrast only. And the left house that is a little bit too bright here, it didn't get better with HDR.. still too bright, although I used an underexposed pcture that was really nice in this part.

I had the same problems with fdr tools. I do like the feature of being able to choose what i want overlap between exposures. Nice feature. FDR Tools do have a couple of different tonemappers available, but i actually never really liked them.

I really like photomatix from hdrsoft.com. Think theres a "free" version you can download and play with, but it creates a watermark in the finished tonemapped image. But try to test all the versions you can find, we all have different needs :)

Also i tend to find that i really need to just go crazy with the sliders to get something funny out of it or rather to get the "art" that i want for a particular shot

The tonemapping used between this:


and this:



are completely different. To the point of extreme. Some like it. Some don't :)

It has taken me the better part of a year to begin to understand how tonemapping really works and when i sit down now and look at an HDR i can say: "I want to go this way" and then make the sliders work for me, to create the final LDR. Don't know if it makes sense. So my point is FDR Tools could work, i just never hang round long enough to understand it.

Try the same exposures with different tonemappers/programs maybe that can show you what program is working for you.

Do you convert to TIFF/JPG before tonemapping or are you using your RAW shots directly ?

I used jpg, because when I used raw the program took far toooooo long to do the tonemapping.. I don't want to wait 1 hour just to see that the result is not what I wanted and then do it again *sigh*

Well i can understand that :)
But it its worth while redoing the tonemapping with the RAW files for the final image. RAW files contains a lot more information than the JPGs.

I agree to Mad. I always shoot in RAW + JPEG with my 400D and only use the RAWs for post-processing because it produces much higher quality photos. The things you photograph are not replaced the quality of course, but to get the last bit of contrast, editability etc. RAW is the way to go, especially for HDR where I got extremely bad results with my first JPEG tries and it needed a few RAW images to produce my first "showable" HDR :-) www.ipernity.com/doc/chris82/1590575

HDRShop - its taking a little time to get to grips with it but the results are believable. I'm using Canon RAW (CR2) files converted to JPG at a 5 stop exposure range. The assembled image is then tonemapped via plugin. The programs are a little clunky to handle - controls aren't very intuitive to make adjustments, no sliders or graphic interfaces. So I am working out where in the scale of about 5 parameters things happen and what the effect is.

I alternatively use Photomatix or Dynamic Photo HDR.
If I get the result I want with DPHDR, then OK. If not, I try with Photomatix.
Both do not give the same result. It also depend on the aligning step.
But DPHDR is much cheaper, and allows a larger choice of settings.

I use Artizen HDR and I do jpg's I have other things to do in my life rather than wait for raw to process and I can live with the results.