Rob and I have been discussing how far a tone mapped HDR will take you towards a realistic look before the photographs end up looking like they were coloured in by an acid addict with a set of wax crayons.
In striving for realism, a match to the subjective picture you have in your mind’s eye; how the scene was lit, what mood was evoked, memories that are always somehow hyper-saturated with a fine Gaussian blur?
How close can you push it before you go over the cliff?
I’m tired of HDR done badly. Photosharing websites are weighed down by the super saturated “I’m on LSD” cartoon coloured photos with dull grey skies and shiny light halos surrounding everything in sight.
Here is my take on HDR – 3 hand-held exposures tone-mapped in Photomatix with a little Photoshop masking love and a dash of Nik DFine noise reduction.
Let me know what you think – am I on the right track or is the Sin City wax-crayon tone mapping the processing which appeals to a mass audience?
Love it or hate it, but High Dynamic Range Images are here to stay. The ability to create a composite image with a higher dynamic range than a single photograph can capture (and thereby creating images closer to what the eye sees) and then tonemap the result was a technique that excited me no end when it first appeared in mainstream software like Photomatix.
The problem is that it is now so easy to create absolutely awful photos and call them HDR, as such HDR imaging has become something of a pariah amongst serious photographers. There are plenty of examples of the super-saturated, overly sharpened, cartoon cutout type HDR pictures on Flickr and the like and there are some people who are getting rather irate by the whole business. In the end it’s about personal taste and I’m not going to hob-knob about saying what you should or shouldn’t like.
There is a new contender on the block in the HDR creation space and I think they’re worthy of serious attention. HDR Max is a simple to use and powerful product which seems to hide a lot of the complexity of making an HDR image yet retains enough control to produce beautiful and more importantly, realistic HDR images. The image below is one I sent off to the Ariea HDR photo challenge for a bit of fun (Ariea is the company which makes the HDR Max software). What I found really impressive is that the image was composed of 3 hand-held photos (no tripod involved) and the software did a really good job of sticking the exposures together. It is worth noting that Photomatix completely bungled this one – especially the grass which ended up looking like a shaggy lime-green carpet.
Absolute quiet, warm with a cooling breeze, the sound of birds and animals in that special cool of the evening when there is enough light to retire down to the watering hole for a drink and a roll in the mud. Six weary and footsore walkers go to where the horizon seems to meander forever into the red ocean of the setting sun.
Elephant like tiny ants make their way between herds of zebra and buffalo; tiny like ants on the great expanse of the African savannah. Here, couched in the natural rhythms of life as millions of years of evolution had intended, the stresses of the modern world seem ridiculous and so far removed from reality. Board rooms, meetings, computers and traffic stress seem a million miles away and unimportant in this natural order.
| Title | Sunset over an African Savannah |
| Taken on | 21 August 2007 |
| Kruger National Park, South Africa | |
| EXIF | f/20 1/4 ISO200 |
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