Boy have I been confused a bit about this High Dynamic Range merging stuff. I've been reading my new book, "The HDRI Handbook," and I now am beginning to get a handle on why the HDR images can look so, so good. But I thought I would share some of my confusion because I thought that maybe someone else was similarly confused.
I've been playing with Photoshop's Merge to HDR where I converge 5 or more images into a single high dynamic range image (32 bits). Well, they always looked muddy to me. Here's my most recent example:
It sort of looks ok, and it has the full range, but everything looks muddy to me. THEN earlier today I read about TONE MAPPING where you use some fancy tools to compress the entire range into an 8 bit per channel (i.e., JPG) output. Here's what I got when I did that!
For those interested, I downloaded a tool called Photomatix from http://www.hdrsoft.com/. It's a complicated program with an easy interface (i.e., slide the sliders, but that doesn't mean that you know what you're doing, but I'm only getting started on this).
Now, maybe I amped up the saturation just a bit in my excitement, but this is looking interesting! I need to learn how to use the tools, but I can see why people are excited about this stuff now.
Also, I learned the name for the kind of photography that we've been doing....it's called "Exposure Blending" where you take multiple exposures and blend them together to get an end result image that is the kind that you get with high dynamic range. For me to create this image took me only 15 minutes. It would have taken much more work than that to do it the way that I usually assemble the photograph.
Margaret Hokkanen, Encinitas Real Estate
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