Post Your Best HDR Photo

[qwRad]

I'm still not very good at this but I think this turned out ok. It's the subway construction site near where I live. Composed from 3 shots.


7D + Samyang 8mm Fisheye

EDIT: If you want to see the full size version click the link to my blog in the signature.

[DLS]

@qwRad: It looks great to me. Like the sky and the different colored lights. Well balanced and realistic looking. Well done!

Damian

[rlriii13]

+1. Looks nice, and I can see myself standing there watching the work.

[qwRad]

Thanks for the feedback. I was aiming for the realistic look and really liked the blue lights that came in from the right. One thing I wasn't able to get right in my opinion was the neon sign of the hotel on the left. Have to check out some tutorials to see how I can improve it.

[Don Burkett]

Good shot, neon is tricky for me as well. Usually I expose one frame in the set for the neon and then just go back to that shot and then clone it back into the HDR version. Though in doing this, if you have any blooming of the light in your HDR version, you will have some extra work blending the intensity to get it to look right.

[Don Burkett]

Here's another one from this set

Really like this one. The pink tones really sets up a nice look

[Sheiky]

I'm still not very good at this but I think this turned out ok. It's the subway construction site near where I live. Composed from 3 shots. 7D + Samyang 8mm Fisheye

EDIT: If you want to see the full size version click the link to my blog in the signature.

Thanks for getting this thread back up Sampsa Great shot! On your blog it looks even more impressive. I really like the extreme wide angle in this shot, there's still a lot of things to watch to. Also I like the different tones of light coming from the construction lights. Nice one!

[Dr Croubie]

nice job, qw, that's a very good example of the 'good' style of HDR, nice detail in the lights and shadows, and colours in the equipment and such.
I still don't have a job yet, but there's a lot going around in the centre of australia in the mines, they pay a hell of a lot of money but I'd rather not go work there because of the heat and dust and conditions etc, but one thing that would convince me would be the possibility to get a shot like that of a minesite (and the ability to afford a 1DX+TS-E24 with a week or two's paycheque would be nice too).
ps, where in Finland is there a subway? (or going to be?).

Meanwhile, this one i've been working on solidly for days, I may have shared an earlier iteration in another thread, it was a +/- 1/3EV shot I took in Leiden in January (yes, good weather in NL in January).
First I grabbed the raw-processed-to-jpg files, stitched them to a .exr using Hugin, then tonemapped using Luminance HDR (which may have been what I shared elsewhere). For my workflow, I start by experimenting with settings at a small size, like 512px wide, they take less than a minute to tonemap. Once i've got it nearly down, i'll tonemap a fullsize 18MP version, which takes 20 minutes or so. After a few of them (and others using the same method), I came across the fact that using Hugin is no good, it boosts the darkest frame to incredible-noise-levels and pastes it in with the other frames, so all the darkest spots end up looking purple and full of noise. So never again using Hugin for creating .exr files.
So now I use Luminance to create as well as tonemap, I started by reading in the .cr2 raw-files and tone-mapping from there. after a few small ones I started on the large 18MP 20-minute versions again. But then you see things that don't show up at smaller size, like colours of small sections or noise coming in. So I tonemapped 33 different versions with different combinations of gamma/contrast/saturation ('detail' I left at 1, any higher makes for noise and weird weird ghosting-shadows).
Then I decided that the noise was still too high, this time in the sky, even shrunk to 1MP files they had white speckles everywhere. So I went back to DPP, raw-processed-to-jpg again, but this time with a high-noise reduction, like 3:4 (for a 7D iso100 shot). The difference in the jpgs is huge, no detail in the bricks on the church wall or the big windows either. But still, I mashed them in Luminance and tonemapped, and after 11 20-minute tonemaps, I still wasn't happy.

So this morning, I went back to one of the 33 .cr2-mashed-tonemapped files, opened it in GIMP, did a fuzzy select on the sky by colour, after a few minutes learning how to use the tool, I applied some Gaussian Blur to just the sky. I'm still not sure if i'm 100% happy, the tonemapping algorithm does weird things like making the bottom-right corner almost black, but this is good enough until I get bored enough again.
But still, at least i've learned an absolute heap about using these programs in the process, I'm trying to convince myself that next time it won't be so bad...
Meanwhile, including the .exr files, and all the tone-mapped files saved at 100% quality PNG (all ~60mb each), I have 50 files totalling 3.2GB just for this one photo (not counting the original raw/jpg files). No wonder my 500GB backup drives are totally full.

So anyway, this is as good as this shot is getting for now:

[qwRad]

Thanks Dr Croubie. Working in a mine sounds very interesting (ranks in the same category of 'cool' high-pay jobs as working on an offshore oil platform in my book) and photographing one would be even cooler

There is a subway in Helsinki (the capital of Finland), it's called metro here. It's very simple compared to most cities, basically just a single line from west to east that splits to two at the eastern end. You can see it in google maps with the transit option selected: here (the stops are marked with blue M letters). They are now expanding the 'network' to west to the neighboring city of Espoo where I live. You can read more about the project on their site if you are interested.

Sounds like you can soon write a nice guide about doing HDR on Linux with all your newly found knowledge. The photo is looking good also. I would love to see a higher resolution version to check out more of the details!

[weewillo]

I love this thread - some great pics on here.

Just a quick question regarding HDR.

I see that some people bracket the images whilst others do different time exposures.

Just wondering what the advantages / disadvantages are of each ( if there are any)???