Nikon d5000 1st HDR

[Provo]

Hello all new to the forums I come from using a point & shoot regular camera fuji e900 and now my fiance has bought me an early birthday gift what she purchased for is a d5000 and extra 55-200mm lens.

I have been on various sites and forums reading tutorials etc. This is a picture taken while positioned in my balcony I then processed the images for HDR using lightroom2,photomatix,photoshopcs4 and the plugin for photoshop called noiseware. Here is my 1st hdr

[OsmosisStudios]

What on earth is that huge red splotch on the bottom?

HDR is one of those things that some will love and some will hate. Personally this is way overdone: HDR should be subtle. That's my opinion though.

[gazsus]

The previously mentioned red splotch apart, I really like this HDR. Very clean result (if we ignore the distracting red splotch and lens flare on the right-hand tree).

[Provo]

I had positioned the tripod in my balcony where I have halloween decorations so I managed to capture the top portion of one of the decorations, I also managed to capture in the upper corner a part of the roof line, and yes of course lens flare but I would at least expect lens flare being that I aimed right at the sunlight breaking through the tree.

[radityopradipto]

IMHO, I also think that this HDR was overdone.
However, you said it's your very first HDR right? Then it should be OK later on, coz people tend to overdone it at the beginning and getting better later on (no offence, but that's what I observed from my friends' HDR)
Don't worry, you'll get better as you learn more about HDR...
If you look more about Pro's HDR, you'll learn a lot from there
Cheers

[pawnslinger]

Well, I liked your HDR! The lens flare and Halloween decorations detract rrom artistic effect, but don't play a role in the HDR effect itself. When I started playing around with HDR, I tried Photomatix, but had trouble getting my images to align properly. My camera doesn't have the proper mechanics to do good HDR work using AE Bracketing, so I have to manually do it, and even with a tripod, I found that the misregistration of the images was hard for most programs to cope with. Then I found Dynamic-Photo HDR and although it took some work, I was able to align images that were previously impossible to align any other way.

I like the dramatic effect of the sky with clouds, but the hard part is controlling the halo effect where the sky meets the darker objects on the ground. I leave it in, for effect, in some of my work, but I really like it when the HDR doesn't have the halo. It is possible to remove the halo using a program like Photoshop, I have read how to do it, but so far I have been unable to successfully do it. I am a bit of a futz at using the Photoshop Magic Wand to do selections, and that is required here.

[tokyotom]

I kind of like it. Just pay attention to the composition next time.

[Almond.Butterscotch]

Originally Posted by OsmosisStudios

HDR is one of those things that some will love and some will hate.

I'm one of those people that as a general rule of thumb, hate it. Occasionally I'll come across one that's subtle and serves to enhance its subject rather than just making it overly vivid and colorful (I find my preferences with HDR tend to lie in the B+W zone), but what actually bothered me most about this (asides from flare and red blotch) was the bit of ?ceiling? you caught on the top left corner.

As someone said before, pay attention to composition.