Photomatix Test 3
Since I was in an awesome location recently (the Park Hyatt in Beaver Creek, Colorado), I decided to use the property to do some practice. One thing I wanted to make sure to test was blending exposures to get a useful image of the room and the view outside the balcony doors. The image you see above is the third sample of three tests I did.
My test images are a sequence of 5 photos, taken at -2EV, -1EV, 0EV, +1EV and +2EV. Pretty sure I had set them in shutter priority mode and not in manual mode, as the procedure above suggests. I did use a tripod, but I did not use the Remote Shutter Release. Even though my Olympus E-510 has Image Stabilization, I may have introduced enough bounce by pushing the shutter with my finger that some alignment errors exist. As I said, the test set has inherent flaws.
While smaller versions of this image look almost comical, like many HDR images do, when this image comes up to a decent size, it does in fact resemble what I saw when I walked in the room. This one was also generated via the Lightroom Export Plugin, and also involved going the Generate HDR | Tone Mapping route. Alignment was via object matching, and light smoothing was set to medium (the middle radio button). This is a pretty close approximation, at least in my eyes.
Doing this exercise brought to light a few things:
1. I need to follow the directions
2. I need to use the remote shutter release
3. I need to continue using my tripod
4. I need to clean my lens and the UV filter on it
5. I need to play with Photomatix more – this is going to be tough (insert sarcasm here)
5 comments
Fizgig=) wrote...
You are invited to display your image.
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David J wrote...
Please join and add this beautiful photo to DJ's Group!
Welcome / Willkommen / Bienvenue
Herman Bosman wrote...
Hi Chester. Hope things are going well since you left your job. I was going through some random PFRE pics and was curious how this photo would come out if you used the Exposure blending option in photomatix instead of the HDR + tone mapping option. I seem to get more consistent results this way than always have to find the sweet spot with tone mapping settings. So if you have time, a comparison will be great.
Cheers
Chester Bullock wrote...
@SA - I'll see if I can give it a try this week. I still need to watch Dan's video and see how he makes things look so great, but I definitely want to try it out on this one.
Wow!!!!