The photos that made up this HDR image of Hickory Falls were taken on a very cold October morning. I was using a Canon 300mm L with my Canon 5D Mark II. I only took three exposures, two stops apart — 0EV, -2EV, and +2EV. The histogram in the camera showed that my underexposed image captured all of the highlights, and that my over-exposed image captured all of the shadow details. Thus, only three exposures.
Before I loaded the images into Photomatix Pro 4, I made some synchronized adjustments in Lightroom 3. I find it most helpful to my images if I sharpen for source with the raw images, as well as performing some noise reduction. Here are the setting that I find work the best.
I created the HDR image using Photomatix Pro 4 Fusion with Tone Compressor and Detail Enhancer. I didn’t plan it that way, but I liked most of the image using the Fusion operator, but I didn’t like the fact that some of the trees were too dark and the sky looked a little drab. Take a look:
When I viewed how the tone mapping looked using the Detail Enhancer, I noticed that some of the dark trees near the top of the image had better illumination. But that is all that I liked about it, but I made a note to blend them in using Photoshop CS5, with the help of a layer mask. Here it is:
Then I checked out how things looked using the Tone Compressor option. It gave me the best looking sky of the three. So I saved a version of that and blended it in with Photoshop as well.
Here is the Photoshop layers with the layer masks so you can see the areas I blended in:
Using Photomatix Pro 4 Fusion with Tone Compressor and Detail Enhancer
The photos that made up this HDR image of Hickory Falls were taken on a very cold October morning. I was using a Canon 300mm L with my Canon 5D Mark II. I only took three exposures, two stops apart — 0EV, -2EV, and +2EV. The histogram in the camera showed that my underexposed image captured all of the highlights, and that my over-exposed image captured all of the shadow details. Thus, only three exposures.
Before I loaded the images into Photomatix Pro 4, I made some synchronized adjustments in Lightroom 3. I find it most helpful to my images if I sharpen for source with the raw images, as well as performing some noise reduction. Here are the setting that I find work the best.
I created the HDR image using Photomatix Pro 4 Fusion with Tone Compressor and Detail Enhancer. I didn’t plan it that way, but I liked most of the image using the Fusion operator, but I didn’t like the fact that some of the trees were too dark and the sky looked a little drab. Take a look:
When I viewed how the tone mapping looked using the Detail Enhancer, I noticed that some of the dark trees near the top of the image had better illumination. But that is all that I liked about it, but I made a note to blend them in using Photoshop CS5, with the help of a layer mask. Here it is:
Then I checked out how things looked using the Tone Compressor option. It gave me the best looking sky of the three. So I saved a version of that and blended it in with Photoshop as well.
Here is the Photoshop layers with the layer masks so you can see the areas I blended in: