| Joined: | Thu Apr 19th, 2012 |
| Location: | United Kingdom |
| Posts: | 4435 |
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jk wrote:
I agree Eric and Jeff. Sometimes we overwork/overthink the problem or image.
It was one of the reasons why I posted my HDR image off the trees around the stream and also a straight image. Yes the HDR image has a little more shadow detail but when you consider that I could have produced the same result with a quick curves change then it does question why overekaborate by taking 5 images @50MB/image then blend them together and output when one correctly exposed image with a small curves tweak will produce the same output.
For sunset/sunrise it's the only way to avoid blown out and grossly under exposed parts in the same image. It also avoids having to push and pull the extremes of the exposure values. While it can be done, I have heard this argument before, I believe that contributes to the lack of image quality, resulting in disappointment with the final image.
With a 24Mp DX camera or the equivalent FX, you have to enlarge the image far beyond normal needs to even see the noise in most cases.
I have been bracketing all the images I have taken of my fathers slides, I don't always use all of each set, and sometimes the median exposure is all I need, but it costs nothing, digital film is free, even at 36Mp, once I have the images I want, the originals will be consigned to the digital bin, I will just keep one TIFF from which I can make as many JPEGS as I wish, at whatever size.
The slides I am copying are very variable, from almost back to the very faintest image, very over exposed. With one exception I have been able to salvage all of what I believe were my fathers rejects. I am about to move on to his 'keepers' which he used to use to do slide shows.
The D800 produces very malleable images which are a joy to work with. Once processed they are producing some lovely pictures. Extracting usable images from wrongly exposed transparencies is a challenge I haven't been able to meet until the D800 and it does it beautifully, my only wish is that he could have seen the advances in photography since the mid 1960's when he made these slides.
For your project HDR must be a godsend.
Of course the primitive old fashioned way to deal with sunset/sunrise exposure was graduated filters.
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____________________
Eric