photo sharing: HDR

[We-Luv-Disney]

Nice one bostran1! Those clouds just pop with HDR!

 

[boBQuincy]

Ok, so I finally succumbed to the HDR siren song, but I still prefer a more realistic look than what is usually shown as HDR (although the eye-popping ones are really cool).
Truth is, I have been doing HDR for some time, taking 2 or 3 exposures and layering the parts that are exposed appropriately. To make it easier and to get more options I purchased an inexpensive HDR program, DP HDR from MediaChance.

Here are some of the results, from our WDW trip last week:

 

[gokenin]

I like the first one but think that the best of the series is the one from main street I think that the one of the Wilderness Lodge lobby does suffer from being almost phony

 

[AndrewWG]

I must admit that I am really not a HDR fan at all. However, your shot of Main Street at WDW is REALLY nice! Well done. I was wandering where the heck were you standing for that shot? I went up into the train station to get a full view down Main Street whe I was there and all I got was the flagpole in the middle of every shot. I had hoped it wouldn't be so noticable in the pics, but it is still a big honkin' flag pole in the pics. Go figure, huh? How did you avoid that? Did they take it down or something in the past few days?

 

[AndrewWG]

Actually looking at that pic some more, I'm gonna guess that you actually climbed the flagpole to get it. That's the only explaination I can see.

 

[boBQuincy]

The trick seems to be to get a full range of exposures to fit the 8 bits of our monitors but still make it look as though nothing has been done outside the ordinary. This is going to take some practice!

The flagpole is right in the middle of Main Street Square except for when the Christmas parade taping is scheduled. The flagpole was moved over by City Hall so the workers could erect the stage for Regis & Kelly. Afaik we would have maybe one or two days before the taping, and the two days of the taping itself where the flagpole is gone.
Taping was scheduled for Friday and Saturday this year, this photo was taken on Thursday when the stage was almost ready.

It's all about timing! And luck...

 

[jfulcer]

It looks like there's a stage of some sort there, maybe they had it up for the parade and took the flagpole down?

 

[AndrewWG]

The trick seems to be to get a full range of exposures to fit the 8 bits of our monitors but still make it look as though nothing has been done outside the ordinary. This is going to take some practice!

The flagpole is right in the middle of Main Street Square except for when the Christmas parade taping is scheduled. The flagpole was moved over by City Hall so the workers could erect the stage for Regis & Kelly. Afaik we would have maybe one or two days before the taping, and the two days of the taping itself where the flagpole is gone.
Taping was scheduled for Friday and Saturday this year, this photo was taken on Thursday when the stage was almost ready.

It's all about timing! And luck...

Darn, I missed that shot by 3 days!

I knew about the taping of the parade as I have been there for that in the past, but wasn't able to stay that long this year. I have a video that has my DD on my shoulders along the parade route from a few years ago. It is kind of fun to watch.

 

[Groucho]

Ok, so I finally succumbed to the HDR siren song, but I still prefer a more realistic look than what is usually shown as HDR

I have to agree. Initially I was impressed by some of the more outlandish HDRs but as time has gone by, I've liked them less and less and now I just plain don't care for them at all. I'm speaking here, of course, about the ones that call attention to the fact that they're HDRs by showing you a scene that in no way resembles what our eyes would see.

I certainly have no problem with HDR as a tool to increase dynamic range to create a realistic photo - though I'd prefer sensors that were better at capturing such range. (Props to the Fuji S5 here!)

 

[Oogie-Boogie]

I think the fad of HDR blown out shots are definately waning. People were just playing with the tech and astounded at what details they could pull together, and wanted to show off.

HDRLabs has a great new handbook out on how to achieve balanced realistic looking shots using HDR.

Here's an absolutely amazing example of HDR used to bring out a photo that couldn't be taken currently with digital exposures.

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1005&message=25177587

I work in the videogame industry, and EVERYTHING we do now is focused at HDR. Most of the current crop of next gen game titles actually use floating exposures and HDR lighting and sky boxes. Halo 3 is a great example of this.

 

[SharonLowe]

Not a big fan of HDR fake looks. The first 2 are super dark on my screen; they look way underexposed. The main street one is the best of the lot. The WL shot just looks too fake - the colors aren't right.

HDR is a great tool if used right, just like using grad ND filters but more controllable over the whole scene. I just don't like all the HDRs that don't look anything like reality.

 

[alan]

Sorry, Bob, but I'm with Sharon on this one. The colours on the main street one just look way over-saturated. The orange of the edge of the stage and the little red dots all the way up Main street look completely unnatural.

FWIW, a colleague who is very into HDR recommends using the HDR version of a picture as a layer over the original, and he reckons that he very seldom has the opacity of the HDR layer anywhere higher than 20%

regards,
/alan

 

[MICKEY88]

I think the fad of HDR blown out shots are definately waning. People were just playing with the tech and astounded at what details they could pull together, and wanted to show off.

HDRLabs has a great new handbook out on how to achieve balanced realistic looking shots using HDR.

Here's an absolutely amazing example of HDR used to bring out a photo that couldn't be taken currently with digital exposures.

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1005&message=25177587

I work in the videogame industry, and EVERYTHING we do now is focused at HDR. Most of the current crop of next gen game titles actually use floating exposures and HDR lighting and sky boxes. Halo 3 is a great example of this.

that example is interesting, but I wish he would have kept the final pic, horizontal instead of cropping to vertical..

 

[alan]

Erm... did you try clicking on "expand/contract" ?

regards,
/alan

 

[Code]

The key to realistic HDR is all in good tone mapping, and it's something that really has to be done manually.

I really hate the uber fake looking HDRs that use non-local tone mapping (edge detection with a blending radius). I can't stand the halo effect on the skies that are the trademark of this technique.

 

[MICKEY88]

Erm... did you try clicking on "expand/contract" ?

regards,
/alan

uhhh no, but I shouldn't have to, if you're doing a before and after, it's best to keep them the same size, heck clicking makes it worse, it's huge compared to the others

 

[boBQuincy]

Sorry, Bob, but I'm with Sharon on this one. The colours on the main street one just look way over-saturated. The orange of the edge of the stage and the little red dots all the way up Main street look completely unnatural.

FWIW, a colleague who is very into HDR recommends using the HDR version of a picture as a layer over the original, and he reckons that he very seldom has the opacity of the HDR layer anywhere higher than 20%

regards,
/alan

I have to agree, some of the colors are not that far out of line from how the original single best exposure looks but the red bows really got blown out! That may be from my inexperience with the software.
The other option is to go back to layering the three exposures and masking them manually, which gives very believable results (most people never even suspect anything was done to the image).

On my Spyder 2 calbrated monitor at home the two darker images look ok, here at work they appear way too dark. Something to look into, since I am pretty sure Sharon has a calibrated monitor too.

The idea of overlaying the HDR with the one best exposure sounds good, I'm going to try that!

Most of this is really an extension of what Ansel Adams was doing to make a full range scene fit onto a print with a D-max of less than 2.0. We have it a lot easier than he did!

 

[Groucho]

I work in the videogame industry, and EVERYTHING we do now is focused at HDR. Most of the current crop of next gen game titles actually use floating exposures and HDR lighting and sky boxes. Halo 3 is a great example of this.

The HDR I've seen in games that I've played (and granted, I don't play as much as I used to) seems to be the exact opposite of HDR - overconstrasty with tons of "bloom" - which is videogame-speak for "washed-out colors", what HDR is supposed to avoid! Whenever I have the option, I turn it right off - I think (and hope) that such effects will go the way of the over-prevalent lens flare that was all the rage a few years ago.

I only played the PC version of Halo (to completion, even) and hated it so I'm unlikely to see much of Halo 3 outside of maybe a few seconds on X-Play any time soon. I don't care for the PC version of Gears of War, either (which I thought I'd like as I've loved previous Epic stuff), but I'm loving Bioshock, which I didn't like from the previews. Guess you never can tell!

 

[Oogie-Boogie]

Bloom in most PC games isn't actually HDR in-engine. It's a post process screen effect that runs in the GPU card, and simply adds an additive layer of the original frame buffer that's been blurred to heck and gone, to make everything 'glowy'. You'll see this in Guild Wars and other PC games. It's a nice effect at times, but does tend to blow out the brights and oversaturate.

Halo3 uses an actual HDR based engine, with a floating point exposure range. The screen is limited to a finite range, and the game automatically adjusts overall exposure as the dynamic range of all the combined content on screen changes. There's a slight lag to it, so you can get 'flare outs', but then the exposure will adjust to compensate, much like the iris of a human eye dilating or contracting to control light to the retina.

Halo2 for the PC is actually a fairly old engine, retrofitted for the PC, and doesn't really have anything in common with Halo3 on the xbox360.

HDR in games is going to go through much the same evolutionary process as HDR imaging in photography has gone through over the last few years, but I expect you'll see a lot more crazy overall results, due to tech and the nature of the development cycle locking people into decisions for years at a time.

 

[Oogie-Boogie]

that example is interesting, but I wish he would have kept the final pic, horizontal instead of cropping to vertical..

Heh. Click on the image, it'll expand to show the whole thing. Dpreview uses a funky image embedder, that just does that on it's own.