One of the greatest bug-bears of HDR has been the halo effects due to tone-mapping. I’ve been trying out several HDR software, with the latest being HDR efex pro and Photomatix, but somehow I still couldn’t get it to look as natural as I want. Well.. today I just got one step closer =)
Read on for more details…
The bottom picture is produced using HDR efex pro, which is quite fake to be honest. To be fair, this is a scene with a rather extreme dynamic range, and I had to use 9 exposures to get them all in, but hey.. isn’t this what HDR is for?
Unfortunately, try as I might, the halos are still very obvious. One could argue that I could take it into photoshop to mask out the halos, but that would be a rather tedious job. I could also just blend exposures in photoshop all the way, but I’m so lazy I’ll only do that for the very favourite pictures.
And so, I chanced upon a secret sauce to a more natural blend, and it isn’t exactly too time consuming. A few more pictures for illustration..
Forests.. normally a very difficult scene to blend.. (9 exposures)
Indoors, also a rather difficult scene to recreate naturally (9 exposures)
And finally, the usual sunsets. This is an improved version of the 2 images I had from the previous post.
So there! I won’t be revealing the secret sauce just yet, in case you are wondering. =P. Ha.
1 comments:
I have question! How did you add the thing on your blog where it says Home, My gear and Portfolio. I am using a template the awesome one I just don't know how to add that! if you could tell me id be so happy
http://itsmyopinion1.blogspot.com/
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