Non Colorado HDR

[greg1701]

[greg1701]

[greg1701]

[greg1701]

[greg1701]

[greg1701]

[FireDawg]

your photos are amazing and you do an excellant job of jeeping them realistic. Do you have a standard work flow that you use the same for each image? Are all your shots bracketed or are they a mixture of tome mapped single files, combined exposures from a single raw file, and bracketed images. Sorry for all the questions but I would love to improve to the point whre I get shots like yours. Great job and TFS!

[greg1701]

Originally Posted by FireDawg

your photos are amazing and you do an excellent job of keeping them realistic. Do you have a standard work flow that you use the same for each image? Are all your shots bracketed or are they a mixture of tome mapped single files, combined exposures from a single raw file, and bracketed images. Sorry for all the questions but I would love to improve to the point where I get shots like yours. Great job and TFS!

First of all, thanks.. thats very nice of you to say. Still trying to find that sweet spot between realism and HDR.. every month that goes by my processing gets less and less "HDRy" I think... but I surmise from reading threads on here most people kinda go thru that as well..

As for workflow, whether I shoot 3 exposures or 1 totally depends on weather conditions, traffic flow, pedestrians present and moving... in other words, how much ghosting am I going to have to account for... If its a windy day and there are trees about then I always shoot just one RAW and then, to your second query, split them in post BEFORE processing in Photomatix. I know PM and PS will accept single images for tonemapping, but I've chatted with a few PM techs and they, and their website info, feel that their software algorithms handle the HDR process better when there are 3 images (or more) rather than 1 RAW. I've done side by side tests trying both and I almost always get more satisfying results from multiple images rather than 1. In most cases I can just split the 1 RAW into three shots and it is just fine.. In scenes where there is a ton of dynamic range (sunset, dawn, etc) then I've found that trying to shoot 3 in camera if possible is always best.

Then again, if I'm lazy, the tripod stays home and I shoot singles for splitting later

As always though there are multiple ways to do these things... this is just my preference..

Cheers,
Greg

[FireDawg]

Thanks for the input Greg, much appreciated

[TrevorKThomas]

Greg,

The colors in the last Cathedral shot are something else. The arch is really cool. HDR, I've found, definitely takes some tweaking of the sliders. I'm hoping to be able to get some better shots with good contrasts so I can play around more.