My 1st HDR, help with halos..

[paulq]

Hi there,
After seeing some HDR photos, I decided to try it myself. But I am not satisfied with my first HDR photo. FIrst of all, is this image ideal for HDR? And I think I overdid it because of the halos around the trees. I used photomatix for to merge my pictures and I am not that familiar with the software. Can anyone suggest how to remove the halos? Finally, are overdone HDR photos not good? Thank you so much!

[IMG][/IMG]

canon xsi
f/11
1/60 (+ and -2 AEB)
iso 100

[windrider86]

Overdone? it all depends on the look you are going fo. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I got a bit burned out on the HDR thing so I dont do them so much anymore, but what I used to was to do several layers, using one of the orginal images as well as the merged images. Thatw ay you can still use a bit of the orginal, which is how I got away from the whole halo thing.

[Digidave]

Adjusting your "Light Smoothing" will help with halos but it usually takes more than 1 adjustment. Try adjusting down the Strength setting.

[kencaleno]

Adjusted blue saturation,contrast,gave a slight sharpen-regards, Ken

[NathanO]

I've been searching for this kind of solution for my HDR shots as well. I finally found a good one (lost the link though) that really seems to work for me:

1. In photoshop, open your HDR image with the halo as well as the extreme original shots (-1 and +1 .. or -2 and +2....however you shot the HDR)

2. Set the bottom layer as the HDR halo image, put the dark image in the middle, and the light image on top.

3. Duplicate the HDR halo image into a new layer and place this on the very top. (Make a sandwich with HDR 'bread'.

4. Look at your HDR image to see where the halos extend (In your pic, they're most visible at the tops of the trees.)

5. In the dark layer, erase everything that's not in the halo region. Do the same thing to the light layer.

6. In the top HDR layer, Erase the halo area. You can do this by setting a large feathered brush and just erasing the halo area

7. Play with the blend settings in the dark image. What works for me is the burn/darken/ and sometimes screen settings.

8. Adjust the opacity of the dark layer until it looks better.

9. If it looks odd, this is what the light layer is for. You can adjust the intensity of the light layer to compensate for that dark layer.

10. When everything looks decent, adjust the opacity of the top HDR layer. Usually, saturating this layer by a small amount makes it a little better overall

The settings I usually work with are:
Top HDR layer: Opacity 15-25% blend mode lighten/screen/overlay
Light Original Layer: Opacity 20-50% blend mode overlay/darken/burn
Dark Original Layer: Opacity 15-35% blend mode burn/darken/screen
Bottom HDR Layer: Opacity 100% blend mode normal

I'm typing from memory as I don't have photoshop here at work. Hope this helps a little bit. The biggest thing is to change the opacity (increases/decreases layer impact on image) and to change the blend modes. If you can't tell a difference, move the sliders to the extremes to see what the mode does. If it doesn't look like it will help, change blend modes.

[sybren]

Try using Hugin together with Enblend. It doesn't suffer from those halos, and it also produces a much more natural result. If you're not after those over-processed HDR shots it's definitely worth a try.

[Digidave]

All good suggestions but the original post asked for help with photomatix. The software is perfectly capable of producing nice looking HDR's or overproduced HDR's. You just have to take the time & have patience to find the right combination of settings. Every photo will be different.

[paulq]

Thank you all for your suggestions! Nathan, i really appreciate your step by step tutorial. I will definitely try that NOW hehe.. I guess I will just have to learn photomatix better. I appreciate all your comments and suggestions. Thank you so much!

[paulq]

Originally Posted by kencaleno

Adjusted blue saturation,contrast,gave a slight sharpen-regards, Ken

Ken thanx for doing some adjustments, I like it.

[wattsbw2004]

easier solution is to blend the orginal exposure that looks the best for the sky by creating a layer mask and brushing the original sky back into the the tonemapped version. Here is a recent one I did very quickly the other day.



This method even works for when you have obvious movements and discrepancy in the clouds and want to make them look better and more natural.