↑All that remains's blog

As you will know, I have a copy of HDRShop. What I can't get anyone to give me is any pointers on what to do when.......

So it looks like I will just have to do it myself and leave hints for future generations later. I started with a raw file which I converted in to seven JPG files in 1 stop steps from

 

My lowest available stop

to

blown highlights

I have a camera specific gamma correction curve which I used because I don't want to go second guessing this stage yet.

 

So on to tonemapping - using the plugin defaults you get a very grainy "over-exposed" image with lots of colour noise. I took this to mean the luminesence was too high for the software to cope. So I adjusted the key value lower until I reached a satisfactory level (0.01). I also lowered the integer on sharpening to 4 to reduce some of the noise.

night scene HDR test

So there we have it key controls overall brightness (exposure) of the final tonemapped image (low darken - hi brighten) and Phi controls the sharpness (low integer no sharpening).

Well sort of, did you know you can test the beta 2.0 for 30 days? Well I've had a play with it and I must say I like the useability. But as I mentioned on Flickr when I posted this,

Three old men leaning on a wal…

I'm not sure I can justify the £200  it will cost against the amount of real use I am going to get out of it. If it was my career or a move towards that level of product with home printing I think I would. I certainly would jettison a lot of the work I do in photoshop in 8 bit in favour of 16bit. But mostly no-on would notice at A4 size. When I do require a little more 16 bit control I can use the Canon DP which is fine and gives me more options than the Raw converter plugin with photoshop elements.

 

Incidently Monaxle swears by it and I guess uses it as his first stage work through