Cloudy Kudremukh in HDR

After shooting the waterfall I covered in the last blog, rain was following me. So leaving all the thoughts of getting any photos of birds or other wild life I changed my lens to wide angle and concentrated on getting some landscapes. The ambiance was beautiful, but continuous rain was hampering my photography. I waited for a long time in my car for the rain to subside and give me some clear view. Here are few photos I could get on that day. First picture above is a fusion of 3 photos which then converted into High Dynamic Range picture (HDR) using hdrsoft’s Photomatix Pro. I tried to retain the natural look as much as possible as I don’t like the grungy looks of many HDR’s.

Cloudy Kudremukh in Sepia

I have used Canon EOS 5D mark II with Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 L USM Lens & Canon EF 24-105mm f/4.0 L IS USM for these photos. I also did a sepia conversion of HDR from another set of 3 photos. As I was returning I could get a brief moment of cloud raising from the thickets of Shola forests which I captured as panorama. Now let me allow the pictures to speak for themselves.

Cloudy Kudremukh

Cloudy Kudremukh

Kudremukh Panorama

Ship Wreck HDR

There is a wrecked ship lying in The Gurpur River near Tannir Bavi, Mangalore. Locals claim it was wrecked during the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. It provided me a very nice opportunity to test the new version of Photomatix Pro 4 software. Even though Adobe Photoshop has now built in HDR function, Photomatix is one of my favorite HDR software.

High dynamic range imaging (HDRI or just HDR) is a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminance between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than current standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods. The human eye can perceive scenes with a very high dynamic contrast ratio, Human eye sees more than 15 stops with a contrast up to 16384:1. Adaptation is achieved in part through adjustments of the iris and slow chemical changes, which take some time (e.g. the delay in being able to see when switching from bright lighting to pitch darkness). At any given time, the eye’s static range is smaller, around 10,000:1. In contrast digital photographs, color negatives and slides consist of multiple film layers that respond to light differently. Most digital camera sensors have 11 stops of light with a contrast of 2048:1. To obtain High dynamic range we need to resort to High dynamic range imaging technique.

Ship Wreck HDR

I used my Canon EOS 5D mark II with Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 L USM Lens to take this photograph. I shot three bracketed shots with 2 stop exposure variation between the shots. So one shot was 2 stops under exposed than the normal exposure, second shot was correctly exposed and third was 2 stop over exposed. I fed these 3 shots into Photomatix through Adobe Lightroom using the new Adobe Lightroom plugin. After going through the Photomatix it produced a 32 Bit file which I did tone mapping to my taste. After developing in tone mapping process of Photomatix it was imported back to Lightroom as 16 bit Tif file. I exported the correct exposure file and the HDR file to Photoshop to remove the ghosting artifact. Once corrected I re-imported back to Lightroom.

Ship Wreck HDR

I would recommend any HDR enthusiast to refer to the invaluable HDR website along with very informative tutorials by Trey Ratcliff called Stuck In Customs. It has given me several insights, tips and methods to improve on my HDR photos.

Exposure Fusion

Pre-Monsoon clouds were gathering as I shot this photo at Seethanadi Nature Camp inside Someshwara Wild Life Sanctuary, Hebri Karkala. I used Canon EOS 5D mark II with Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 L USM Lens on a tripod to get 3 bracketed images at 2 stop difference. I used Photomatix Pro to fuse exposure of these three bracketed shots to produce this photo. In Expo­sure Fusion a series of brack­eted images are processed to produce a dynamic range image. It takes the best tonal­i­ties from each image in the sequence and com­bines them to cre­ate a sin­gle image. Best part of each image gets recorded and fused together to com­bine all of the best ele­ments in final image. You have quite a lot of control to adjust which tonality of the exposures are used in the final image.

You might ask how is Expo­sure fusion is different from HDR? The only resem­blance the two have are that they com­bine a sequence of brack­eted images together. In Expo­sure Fusion the final prod­uct looks more real­is­tic to how the scene really would like. This means that the shad­ows main­tain a cer­tain amount of shad­ows and the high­lights remain brighter in higher tonal­i­ties then a high con­trast scene.

HDR takes the sequence of images and blends the images seam­lessly but does its best to even the tonal­i­ties in the extreme tonal­i­ties of shad­ows and high­lights. That is why HDR the appear­s arti­fi­cial­ and unnat­u­ral­.

Expo­sure Fusion after fus­ing the images together keeps the tonal­i­ties how they would appear if one was to be look­ing at the actual scene being pho­tographed. HDR image most of the time shows the uneven tran­si­tion between the lumi­nance and can there­fore lose the appeal of real­ism. Expo­sure Fusion pro­duces results that are truer to the scene that the pho­tog­ra­pher is try­ing to capture.

Photomatix Pro produces both fantastic HDR as well as Exposure Fusion. Try it and you will love the results. Trial mode is also available for Photomatix Pro.