My first attempt HDR - Lotus Mahal at Hampi

[nagais]

This is my first attempt at HDR and serious digital post processing in general. Please comment on :
- the effectiveness of HDR here
- the noise and how can I get rid of it
- any honest criticism that would help me improve

Detailed steps that I followed for creating this image are here (tone mapping parameters in Qtpfsgui and GIMP steps) : Random and Half Baked: Lotus Mahal at Hampi - My first attempt at HDR and digital post processing

[Shutterbugdeb]

What a gorgeous building! I think the HDR process enhances it, but I'm really not an expert on HDR, having no experience with it. I do notice some haloing. Overall, I like the photo very much.

[nagais]

Originally Posted by Shutterbugdeb

What a gorgeous building! I think the HDR process enhances it, but I'm really not an expert on HDR, having no experience with it. I do notice some haloing. Overall, I like the photo very much.

Yes, I agree about the halos. These two things - halos and noise removal are going to be the important things that I need to learn more in the future. May be somebody would be able to help me out on how to go about it. Thanks for your comment

[BigFuzzy]

Did the original image have noise?

And yes, the haloing is a sign of a not-so-well done HDR. There are a million resources online on how to do it.

Seeing the software you have/used, I cannot really give you more advice as I don't know them just wanted to give you my opinion about the halos as they were obvious to me.

[digirebelva]

The noise is going to come in from the darkest image when you combine them, I usually run my processed images through PSE (or your PP program of choice) and clean up the noise there by selecting the region and selectively applying either noise reduction or gaussian blur to the individual RGB layers if its that noticeable.

What I first noticed though is the slight tilt of the image..

[harish sutar]

Image is somewhat tilted I think!
Lr has good noise reduction tool!
I have also tried Neat image.

[T.R.R]

Okay I wont comment on what has already been said, but I will add a couple things to the mix. I noticed that the wall on the right has some artifacts of miss alignment and layer blending. If you look close at it you can see the "smear marks". This could just be a result of when the programs blended the layers together. There is a couple other small areas that have those same effects, but the wall was the first one that really jumped out at me. Other then that, I feel this heavy HDR/PP takes away from the building. To me a building like this deserve to have a more Natural HDR done to it. This would be just to bring the colors up, the details, and lighten the shadows. But thats its, this over processed HDR look everyone loves to do, to me just takes away from a great scene such as this. But thats just my opinion.

[JamesBrandon]

Hey there! This is really a great first attempt at HDR, over time you'll learn tricks and techniques to fix the issues in this photo. Here's what I see that could be improved it this image...

1.) The building looks a bit like it's leaning to the right. I think this is partly do to perspective distortion. You can fix this quite easily if you have Lightroom or Photoshop. I just did an article on how to do this in Photoshop over in the Post Production section of the main site.

2.) The noise is definitely an issue when we can noticeably see it in the low res, small version like this. In my humble opinion, the best noise reduction software out there right now is by Topaz Labs, and is called DeNoise. You can also blend in the sky from one of the RAW files and that will help as well. It will also look more natural this way.

3.) The haloing is caused by pushing your sliders too far in Photomatix. This can be fixed by being a bit more careful with the 'smoothing' slider or but blending one of the original skies into your image.

4.) The trees are pushed a bit too far in this image as well, they have that toxic look to them that just doesn't register with my mind, it's a big red flag. You can fix this by going into Photoshop, adding a 'Hue/Saturation' filter, then dragging down the saturation in the yellow channel. You'd think you would need to pull down the greens, but it's the yellows, trust me on this :-).

5.) Finally, the subject is brighter than the sky. This is just opposite of what it should be. If you think about it, it's really just common sense. Unless the subject is lit with artificial light, the sky will always be brighter than the subject. Always.

Keep it up, and let me know if you have any further questions!