timeimmortal

Okay, this is the last of the HDR set concerning the Low Level Bridge in Edmonton. Tomorrow, there will be something different.

I’m really starting to get the hang of Photomatix now, and if I have one complaint it is that it still doesn’t do great aligning HDR images that were taken without benefit of tripod. Mind you, I suppose the lesson I should be taking away from that is that I should remember to bring my tripod with me whenever I head out.

This is another HDR shot, and one I had to touch up a fair bit in Photoshop. For some reason, Photomatix did something horrible to the highlights in the picture (the car headlights, for example), and inserted absolutely painful-to-see artifacts instead of properly rendering the lights. So I had to add those back in.

This is another HDR image, and I think it shows off well the rich colour ranges that become possible in such compositions. Previously, it would have required a lot of tweaking in Photoshop to get the image to anywhere near this level of tonal range.

This is a HDR image created from a single RAW exposure, which means that there’s a bit more digital noise in the shot than I might otherwise accept. But the image itself is pretty good, and the clouds in it look spectacular, especially in terms of colour and contrast.

This is a power pole near where I live, and the shot itself is (once again) a HDR image. I was particularly impressed with how well composing the image in HDR dealt with the lens flare and the intensity of the Sun, both of which can normally look very ugly in the lens I was using at the time.

This is the office block above the new in Edmonton’s downtown core. And while I probably didn’t need to do the image in HDR, it wound up looking very…I’m not even sure what the word is? ‘Ethereal,’ perhaps?

This is a condominium tower under construction in Edmonton. And while the shooting angle was advantageous — I was facing away from the Sun — I still decided to do this as an HDR image.

Of my current crop of HDR pictures, I think this has to be my favourite. It’s a lot more contrasty, and doesn’t have quite the same dynamic range as some of the other pictures (parts of the background are fairly dark), but I love how it looks after a handful of touch-ups in Lightroom.

(My little brother thinks it looks like something from a computer game.)

Continuing on the theme of HDR, here’s a shot of a new condominium tower just west of Edmonton’s downtown.

This is a more subdued HDR shot, edited in Lightroom to give it a kind of “night time” hue.

This is, I think, my second-favourite out of the recent crop of HDR shots I’ve composed. It’s some of the apartments along Edmonton’s river valley, captured against the sunset.

Here’s another HDR image, and then one with slightly more reasonable colours. That’s really the biggest struggle with high dynamic range compositions, I think: getting the colours, especially the saturation values, correct, so that the scene at least kind of resembles “real life”.

Time for another HDR shot. I’ve been experimenting with this technique more and more in recent weeks, and I’m actually starting to get the hang of it (I think).

This shot is a bit wild, I realize — the colour saturation has been boosted quite heavily. I’ve got some more “normal” looking ones, as well as a few others, lined up. This shot is a merge of three exposures, taken at +/- 2 eV and 0 eV exposure. Photomatix was used to assemble the image, with some touchups done in Lightroom.

This is a HDR image composed from a single exposure to restore some background detail around the wedding party. Lightroom was used to produce an overexposed and an underexposed copy, and then Photomatix was used to compose the HDR image proper.

The original image can be seen below the fold.
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