Now that I am getting a little more familiar with manual HDR vs. Photoshop 'Merge to HDR' I decided to go back and redo my first HDR photo. This is the Photoshop 'original' version:
This is the manual version:
I like the sky in the later version and the sign posts are much more legible (they would have been much better if I had use my Rebel XT instead of my SD570IS). The far away trees also look much better; It looks like I will be doing manual HDRs from now on... :)
I tried to make a few more HDR photographs.
The first one is of my house- with the Christmas lights up:
The above was done with the directions from Bjorn 3D's web site and using a 100px masking for the layers in Photoshop. I shot all images from a tripod at f/7.1, ISO100 and 20s, 10s, 5s, 2.5s, 1s and 1/4s exposures.
The results were pretty good, but I wasn't completely happy with it so I went through the process again and made a 50px mask:
This made the shadows on the columns look a little strange, but made the lights not so glaring.
I also tried the same procedure with my Christmas tree (only the lights on it so far- I still need some time to put the ornaments up) and using a 75px mask (in-between the settings I tried on the prior to pictures):
During the creation process I noticed that the 'light' version of the JPG looked pretty cool:
This one looks a little more surreal; I think this is my favorite of the four pictures.
I may try running the first set of photos through the 'Merge to HDR' setting of Photoshop and see what it looks like...
Using some of the advice from the web, I made my first HDR photo last night:
This was taken from my upstairs deck overlooking the intersection by my home. I was headed off to bed and noticed how interesting it looked outside while checking the doors. I found my tripod, setup my Canon SD870 IS and took 13 images (-2 to +2 exposure in 1/3 increments- and '0' is the 13th one). These I imported into iPhoto and switched over to my PC (more processing power and RAM) and opened them in Photoshop CS3. From there I chose File -> Automate -> Merge to HDR...
This was just a quick test to see a little of how it works; I will probably go back and do this manually (as the article recommends) and see if the results differ.
