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HDR photography  Rate Topic 
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Posted by Eric: Thu Mar 7th, 2019 15:12 1st Post
Anyone doing HDR and have photos they want to share?

These were taken in the Honfleur Basin .... processed in Snapseed






And another....




Another angle....



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Eric


Posted by jk: Thu Mar 7th, 2019 19:47 2nd Post
I have been doing some landscape shooting here in Cornwall with my Z7.
Up until this year the support for merging RAW images seemed to be very poor and you had to either do it by hand in Photoshop or other image editors.
However it seems that the latest version of LR and PS now support this but since I wont be paying Adobe any money I wont be using their software.  
To solve this Skylum (previously MacPhun) produce Aurora 2019 but also they have Luminar3, and I have licenses for both, likewise for ON1 RAWphoto2019.  
Once again I have to say that Adobe's attitude to smaller non-corporate users had resulted in them losing revenue as I will NEVER pay subscription for software.  I can name 30 other people who feel the same and so I would say I am not alone with this feeling of resentment towards Adobe.  

I have been experimenting with HDR and find the results interesting in that the traditional 5/7/9image set seem to me a little OTT as I can get a similar result in Photoshop CS6 using a single RAW file but developed to yield a +1.5/0/-1.5 single image that I can blend via Photoshop layers and some actions.

I am on my ipad at present so dont have images available to post.



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Posted by Robert: Fri Mar 8th, 2019 09:33 3rd Post
Perhaps better don my hardhat here... :hardhat:

I  resisted using HDR for a long while because of the effect you present above.  However I did see some examples which appears more 'normal' so I dabbled in Ps but didn't persevere, too much messing about...  Then Lightroom provided the facility, at your prompting with difficult lighting I used bracketing (If in doubt, bracket.), for sunrises and heavy shadow/bright sunlight, high  contrast situations and started using Lightroom's HDR to combine the NEFs.  This is something I now do routinely in these difficult situations, the Flint Castle image being a recent example, bright sky and heavy shadow on the castle walls due to the light source being beyond the castle.  Of course there are situations where bracketing is difficult or impossible.

I have been copying some of my fathers Kodachrome slides, which as you will appreciate often lack shadow detail.  I ran sets of 5 bracketed exposures with varying EV's then selected the best and ran the NEFs with best exposures for shadow, mid range and brights through Lr's HDR process.  A little trick which allows batch processing of many sets, control+H keys add the set to a queue for HDR processing, I have fed Lr with as many as ten sets of images at one time, left the computer for a while and come back to find they are all done to perfection!  Except for the ability to extract otherwise invisible shadow and highlight detail they look entirely normal.  So Yes, I do use HDR but only as a tool to extract the maximum exposure range from a given subject, not the create an HDR 'effect', which I tend to dislike.



Another image with massive EV range, extreme shadows and direct sun...



I bracket wherever I feel the EV range is being pushed, as an insurance if you like, in processing I may not use all or any of the bracketed NEFs, I am becoming more relaxed since the D800 because I feel so much more can be recovered or revealed with the D800 files.  If you look at the histograms of these types of HDR images usually the Adobe software seems to adjust the mid tones and spread them very evenly and eliminate any highlight or shadow clipping.

Unlike JK, I rejoice at the Adobe policy of paying monthly for my photo software, because otherwise I would not have access to such outstanding software at such a low price (less than the price a packet of cigarets a month?  I don't and never have smoked...) but that's a discussion we have had many times before.



____________________
Robert.



Posted by chrisbet: Fri Mar 8th, 2019 09:54 4th Post
I know Honfleur extremely well ( I have a watercolour of the old harbour hanging in my study) and I must say I have never seen it look like that in real life!

Would make jolly good jigsaw puzzles though.

I am with Robert on this one - HDR is a step too far for my taste.

I like the dimness and lack of detail in the shadows, it adds to the focus and mood of an image like a sunset




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Posted by Eric: Fri Mar 8th, 2019 10:07 5th Post
Robert wrote:
Perhaps better don my hardhat here... :hardhat:

I  resisted using HDR for a long while because of the effect you present above.  However I did see some examples which appears more 'normal' so I dabbled in Ps but didn't persevere, too much messing about...  Then Lightroom provided the facility, at your prompting with difficult lighting I used bracketing (If in doubt, bracket.), for sunrises and heavy shadow/bright sunlight, high  contrast situations and started using Lightroom's HDR to combine the NEFs.  This is something I now do routinely in these difficult situations, the Flint Castle image being a recent example, bright sky and heavy shadow on the castle walls due to the light source being beyond the castle.  Of course there are situations where bracketing is difficult or impossible.

I have been copying some of my fathers Kodachrome slides, which as you will appreciate often lack shadow detail.  I ran sets of 5 bracketed exposures with varying EV's then selected the best and ran the NEFs with best exposures for shadow, mid range and brights through Lr's HDR process.  A little trick which allows batch processing of many sets, control+H keys add the set to a sue for HDR processing, I have fed Lr with as many as ten sets of images at one time, left the computer for a while and come back to find they are all done to perfection!  Except for the ability to extract otherwise invisible shadow and highlight detail they look entirely normal.  So Yes, I do use HDR but only as a tool to extract the maximum exposure range from a given subject, not the create an HDR 'effect', which I tend to dislike.



Another image with massive EV range, extreme shadows and direct sun...



I bracket wherever I feel the EV range is being pushed, as an insurance if you like, in processing I may not use all or any of the bracketed NEFs, I am becoming more relaxed since the D800 because I feel so much more can be recovered or revealed with the D800 files.  If you look at the histograms of these types of HDR images usually the Adobe software seems to adjust the mid tones and spread them very evenly and eliminate any highlight or shadow clipping.

Unlike JK, I rejoice at the Adobe policy of paying monthly for my photo software, because otherwise I would not have access to such outstanding software at such a low price (less than the price a packet of cigarets a month?  I don't and never have smoked...) but that's a discussion we have had many times before.
So the extra drama of the sky and more detail in the subject, wouldn't be to your taste ?.....




____________________
Eric


Posted by Eric: Fri Mar 8th, 2019 10:14 6th Post
Or maybe a blend of the two? ;-) Can't tempt you? :lol:



____________________
Eric


Posted by Eric: Fri Mar 8th, 2019 10:20 7th Post
chrisbet wrote:
I know Honfleur extremely well ( I have a watercolour of the old harbour hanging in my study) and I must say I have never seen it look like that in real life!

Would make jolly good jigsaw puzzles though.

I am with Robert on this one - HDR is a step too far for my taste.

I like the dimness and lack of detail in the shadows, it adds to the focus and mood of an image like a sunset


Well yes I agree if you are going for the ethereal look, the last thing you want is enhanced contrast. HDR doesn't work for every subject or situation. 
That's why I prefer not to do it in camera but consider if the final image can be improved? from hyping the detail later.
Sunsets invariably have their own quality that would be spoiled by reducing the silhouette effect.



____________________
Eric


Posted by jk: Fri Mar 8th, 2019 11:58 8th Post
Some of my HDR images

Attachment: Z7-1-1222a-019.jpg (Downloaded 60 times)



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Posted by jk: Fri Mar 8th, 2019 12:02 9th Post
Seem to be having trouble loading more than 2 images so a second post.






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Posted by jk: Fri Mar 8th, 2019 12:03 10th Post
And some more.






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Posted by jk: Fri Mar 8th, 2019 13:05 11th Post
Some more.





____________________
Still learning after all these years!
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Posted by jk: Fri Mar 8th, 2019 13:06 12th Post





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Posted by jk: Fri Mar 8th, 2019 13:08 13th Post





____________________
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Posted by Robert: Fri Mar 8th, 2019 13:08 14th Post
Your first image was slow to load at this end JK.

Those rock formations are quite spectacular, are the rocks stacked naturally or did man have a hand?



____________________
Robert.



Posted by jk: Fri Mar 8th, 2019 15:14 15th Post
First image might be a bit large.
I was going to ask Chris if we could have resize on upload.  We could resize automatically to 1200 longest side, max size 2MB.

The rocks are all natural.  Very spectacular.



____________________
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Posted by Robert: Fri Mar 8th, 2019 15:54 16th Post
1200 is too small and in any case uploaded sizes should be in multiples or fractions of 1024 pixels to avoid pixel jostling.

I was limiting myself to 1024 for the last two or three years but most people have broadband nowadays.

I have raised my Flicker upload size to 2048 on the long side, I feel that's big enough to reveal detail and small enough  to manage.



____________________
Robert.



Posted by Iain: Fri Mar 8th, 2019 15:58 17th Post
While I'm not a fan of it I think it has its uses as long as it's not over done.



Posted by chrisbet: Fri Mar 8th, 2019 20:37 18th Post
I find myself agreeing with Robert again!

Occasional slow upload / download is likely due to server load or delays en route - reducing image size by resizing will only reintroduce the loss of quality you were originally seeking to remedy.

I initially found the hdr images slow to download and they are 1200 wide - since then the just snap onto my screen.



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Posted by jk: Sat Mar 9th, 2019 03:50 19th Post
Maybe we need to have the image size and max. pixel length adjustable by the Admin in a control panel.  
I am more concerned about if it is possible technically at this point rather than the detail of the final upload.  As long as these are known and we document how to change them then adjustments can always be made.

I think that we are now in a place where the camera definition is way beyond the average person's screen or printer resolution 72dpi so what we see on screen is limited.  
I dont want to return to the previous situation where to me posting an image was a disappointment rather than a sharing of pleasure in the image.



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Posted by chrisbet: Sat Mar 9th, 2019 04:25 20th Post
Technically it is possible to set dimensions and filesize limitations and make them settable within the admin panel. It is also possible to turn on or off the resizing entirely.

Whenever resizing is employed, the process is to break the image into data, draw a blank "frame" of the required size and then repopulate the frame with the image data - in the process the image loses data in the same way that it does in camera when saving jpeg files. Halve the image size and you lose 75% of the definition.



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