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.

Today (30th April) Adobe released Photoshop CS5 Trial. I grabbed copy early and wanted to try the new features. here is a quick take on HDR Pro feature of Photoshop CS5.

Among all the new features CS5 boasts HDR Pro is one of the most hyped. Till now we needed to go to 3rd party soft wares like Photomatix Pro to get that HDR look we want. This feature is revamped-from-the-ground-up and called HDR Pro. Like the Merge to HDR feature in Photoshop CS4 and earlier, HDR Pro lets you combine two or more exposures of a single scene into an impossibly rendered composite, complete with wide-open shadows and richly detailed highlights. The big difference: Unlike Merge to HDR, which is about as easy to control. HDR Pro offers superb controls and delivers quite a reliable result.

I quickly compared my Photomatix pro rendered HDR which features in my last blog Nir-Laksha Dweepa-Day2-Kalpeni. I used the same set of files and here is the result with HDR Pro. I think there is definite improvement from the CS4 version. But if you want superior control over your HDR then photomatix is still the king. Let us see the results. First is rendered with Photomatix pro and the second using HDR pro. Judge yourself which one you prefer. As you can manipulate any HDR to your hearts content, there is definitely scope for improvement in both the shots. This is what I liked.

Photomatix Pro Rendered HDR

HDRPro Rendered HDR

Remove Ghosts option is new in HDR Pro. This will eliminate movements when you are shooting multiple images in a busy environment. I had a photograph of Tilakkam island from that trip which I had taken as HDR but was unable to publish as there was ghosting artifact I thought that would be perfect candidate for checking ghosting option and predictably it came out picture perfect with HDR Pro. Here are the results. First one is with Photomatix Pro which produced nice output but with lot of ghosting artifact which is minute but visible on large photo.

Photomatix unable to resolve Ghosting

Here the same set of photos by HDR Pro which ghost elimination has made it crisper. Even though I like the output Photomatix produces HDR pro is winner here.

HDR pro which removed Ghosting artifact efficiently

Remember that this is not a definitive review or a shootout between this two HDR softwares. It is just a short comparison I did within the short time I had to express my views. I welcome your view on that.