jet

November 10th, 2009 | hdr, postprocessing | No Comments »

Shot this jet/plane during a small exhibition a couple of weeks ago at the Antwerp Airport. Public was allowed so close to this jet, my 17mm wasn’t almost enough to get the entire plane in the frame. Shot it with the camera all the way down to the ground without being able to look through the viewfinder. After a couple of times trying aiming, this composition came out, sort of what I had in mind. PP-wise this shot has seen a single frame HDR tonemapping in Photomatix together with a serious desaturation. Original image can be found here.

jet


Balancing sky and foreground: HDR, exposure blending and exposure fusing

April 13th, 2009 | landscapes, postprocessing | 5 Comments »

Trying to make a nice landscape photo involves one big challenge: the sky is much brighter than the foreground. The best solution to tackle this problem is to use graduated neutral density filters, but these babies are expensive. Another solution is to take different exposures of the scene and put them together afterwards in some way or another. You can do this manually in Photoshop (like this photo), but there are other more automated techniques.

The first one and the most well-known technique to put different exposures of a scene together is HDR. For the following photo of the sun rising behind a small farm I used Photomatix to assemble a sequence of 8 shots with a 1 stop difference.

Landscape: HDR

As you see, HDR creates a lot of halos. There is an ugly halo around the left bush and the sky in the branches of the right bushes is brighter than in the middle. On the positive side, there is a lot of detail in the foreground.

In Photomatix there is another option to put your images together: exposure blending. I don’t know exactly what it does, but on the positive side, there are only three sliders to play with. That saves a lot of time compared to tonemapping an HDR photo. I put the same sequence together with Exposure blending and got the following result.

Landscape: Exposure blending

The photo looks much more natural than its HDR version. There are no halos, but there is much less detail in the foreground.

A week ago, I found in this post on Digital Photography School another option to put together a series of shost: exposure fusing. To do a proper exposure enfusion, you need three things: the enfuse software, the image_align_stack.exe file included in the Hugin software (copy the file to the enfuse directory) and the Lightroom plugin LR/ENFUSE. The last one is optional but is very handy. You have to pay for it, but you can give as much as you want. I use the default settings of Enfuse and got the following result.

Landscape: Exposure fusing

As you can see, there is a halo around the left bush. On the other side, there are very nice details in the shadows. More then the blended photo and less then the unrealistic HDR image.

For the future, I am not sure yet what I would use. Both enfusing and blending have their benefits and are much more appealing than HDR.


Internetpret voor 2008-6-13

June 13th, 2008 | del.icio.us | No Comments »

HDR experiment

April 28th, 2008 | Fotografie | 6 Comments »

Ik heb me gisteren eens wat bezig gehouden met HDR fotografie: foto’s van hetzelfde onderwerp maar met verschillende belichting samenstellen tot één foto. Hieronder een eerste experimentje. Wordt nog wel vervolgd als ik meer tijd heb.

Den Brandt

De technische kant: samenstelling van bracketed exposures op -1.3EV, 0EV en +1.3EV.


Internetpret voor 2008-4-28

April 28th, 2008 | del.icio.us | No Comments »