Time Immortal

Although I’m thankful for glass windows in skyscraper offices, I have to admit that sometimes they interfere with what would otherwise be an awesome shot. Especially since the windows in the office that I was shooting this picture from happen to be tinted anyhow (which is a pain to adjust for in Lightroom). That said, a sunset is a sunset, and this one was too good to pass up.

The HDR shot worked, mostly, but I had to add some lens flare in Photoshop to correct for the ugly lens flare added by the lens I was using at the time. Grrrr.

I seem to be doing panoramic photos lately. And it helps that there have been a few photo-worthy sunsets of late, I suppose.

This particular picture was composed from a 3-by-3 grid of photos, assembled in Autopano (Curse your precision, program! I will find your weakness yet!) and then cropped and adjusted in Lightroom. I tried to bring out the buildings in the foreground as much as was possible, although this the results definitely fall short of what one could potentially achieve with HDR. I’m just not ready to try HDR in a panoramic photo yet.

This HDR shot of Edmonton is almost the same as the one from yesterday, but was shot at a wider angle (24 mm instead of 50 mm) so as to get some of the blue of the sky in the actual shot, as well as to give a more zoomed-out view of the towers to the west of the building I was in.

Here’s a shot of Edmonton — well, a part of it’s downtown core, at any rate — from about 17 floors up, looking west and a bit south toward the sunset. This is an HDR image, or at least was put together in Photomatix, although the dynamic range is not staggeringly wide.

Okay, I keep finding shots in the archive from the Scouts Canada camp that I like. This one is a bit dark in the foreground, but I tried to use some pseudo-HDR techniques and ImageFuser to bring out some of the foreground details.

Here’s the first HDR image I’ve created using Enfuse, with ImageFuser for a GUI frontend. It’s a shot from the Scouts Canada camp I was helping set up last weekend — specifically, it’s a shot looking up a ladder at a spare we were lashing between two trees, some 40 feet in the air.

The results aren’t bad. Contrast is a bit low, although ImageFuser gives me a lot of control over that parameter, and I deliberately kept it low for this first attempt. What’s nice is that there isn’t much digital noise in the image, not any more than there was in the ISO 400 source files to begin with.

I’ve been toying with Photomatix for a while now, and I would say that I’ve been impressed with it overall, and for the most part. But it has a few obvious issues, not the least of which is that it often produces very artifacty images. And by artifacty, I’m not referring just to increased digital noise — I’m talking about ugly, hyper-sharpened black spotting on areas with lots of microcontrast.

So I’m experimenting with Enfuse now, which purports to be a more powerful blending algorithm, capable of generating composite images that have been bracketed not only on the basis of exposure, but also on the basis of depth of field/focus. And it claims to be able to do so without producing the same quality degradation that other “conventional” HDR methods can cause.

There’s a Mac-only GUI for Enfuse, which also incorporates Hugin’s powerful image alignment algorithm, that I am currently experimenting with, called ImageFuser. The good Reader can learn more about this software at the developer’s website.

Now, any guesses as to how long my 1 GHz Powerbook G4 will take to render an HDR image, using Enfuse, out of three TIFF-format images, each of 8 megapixel resolution?

This is an HDR shot created from a single exposure. There’s a fair bit of digital noise in the shot, unfortunately, because I took it at a fairly early hour of morning and had to set the ISO a bit higher to begin with (HDR photos always have a stop or two more worth of digital noise to them). Still, I think it worked out not badly in the end. The colour gradiations in the sky are, I think, particularly appealing.