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I have been playing with HDR a little in the evenings, and am not pleased at all with the results. I am quite aware that it is not a panacea, and should be used sparingly. In my web searches, I have found a few results which are very natural, as opposed to the overly saturated typical HDR that are floating around the web. The problem is I am stymied on how to achieve good results- at least what I would consider natural, i.e. not looking like a HDR photo.

 

Can anyone point me in the direction of where guidance could be found.

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Not sure about guidance. Its so very easy to overdo HDR in my experience. I tend to try to use it subtly if at all possible (see http://www.l-camera-forum.com/leica-forum/landscape-travel/99492-buttermere-fell-english-lakes.html as an example). I personally try to bracket by only a stop either way and check the histogram to ensure that I retain the highlight detail I want in the 'underexposure' whilst not trying to increase the shadow detail by a huge amount in the 'overexposure' so that the resulting image looks 'unnatural'. I'd simply experiment on the sort of subject matter that you like shooting and which 'may' benefit from HDR. I have tried HDR on many occasions but have only a handful of images which I feel it was a useful technique to use on and which do not look too outrageous. Whilst I use Photomatix software for HDR it remains a bit hit and miss for me and requires a lot of patience.

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Here is a alternative method,

 

Take a main exposure, then do a darker shot for the highlights, import both as layers in photoshop.

 

turn off the dark shot and go to channels, click on RGB to make a selection based on the RGB values.

 

Then apply this selection as a layer mask to the darker image, this will now blend the images based on lightness of the main image, you can adjust how strong you want this by adjusting the layer density.

 

This can create HDR with highlight details which look VERY natural.

 

.

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Here is a alternative method,

 

Take a main exposure, then do a darker shot for the highlights, import both as layers in photoshop.

 

turn off the dark shot and go to channels, click on RGB to make a selection based on the RGB values.

 

Then apply this selection as a layer mask to the darker image, this will now blend the images based on lightness of the main image, you can adjust how strong you want this by adjusting the layer density.

 

This can create HDR with highlight details which look VERY natural.

 

.

 

This approach sounds intriguing. After all, it is usually the highlights that are more of a concern.

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Guest WPalank
I have been playing with HDR a little in the evenings, and am not pleased at all with the results. I am quite aware that it is not a panacea, and should be used sparingly. In my web searches, I have found a few results which are very natural, as opposed to the overly saturated typical HDR that are floating around the web. The problem is I am stymied on how to achieve good results- at least what I would consider natural, i.e. not looking like a HDR photo.

 

Can anyone point me in the direction of where guidance could be found.

 

 

Terry,

First off, I do not consider myself a HDR expert, but I do like playing with the technique.

Secondly, if you haven't already, I would suggest that you download the application Photomatix Pro. It seems to be the one application that all the gurus agree on.

 

Once you have imported and are developing your image within the program, in the "Smoothing" section select either High or Max. As you go towards the left (Min), it will give you a much more illustrative (opposite of realistic) image.

 

[ATTACH]185018[/ATTACH]

 

 

Keep the Strength setting between 60 and 80. the other slider you have to be careful with is Microcontast. Other than Saturation (I usually lower it) those are pretty much the only sliders I deal with in Photomatix Pro.

 

I use the free Lightroom plug-in (available on the website) which allows me to easily import the 3-5 images for tone-mapping and then re-imports the image back into Lightroom where I process the image in the Develop module. So in other words, I adjust the Exposure, set the white and black point etc. in LR rather than Photomatix. Let Photomatix do what it does best and your image processing program do what it does best.

 

Here is an image I created using the above techniques:

 

[ATTACH]185019[/ATTACH]

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