HDR and such
Ahhh, the human eye! What it can see in terms of dynamic range is quite amazing. If you watch a sunset, your eye can see detail in both the highlights of the sky and the shadows of the foreground. No such luck with a camera. The medium, whether film or digital, will see one or the other well and compromise it’s opposite. Hence the development of high dynamic range, or HDR, software and imaging.
I tried to get out and experiment a little with HDR this weekend. Leaving aside various opinions of HDR images that range from "fine art" to "garish," there are just plain times it's useful. Take this image for example. It was shot at Webster Park and honestly, it was going to take some work to bring out the details of the mural under the bridge. I experimented with bracketing three exposures and importing them into an HDR blending program named Picturenaut, which is donation-ware and at first glance seems to be well worth it.
There is a nice balance between the shadows and the highlights and the image has an overall natural look. That seems to be one of the big selling points of Picturenaut. It delivers a clean image that is very natural looking. Here's another one processed in Picturenaut, with a little help later in the processing stream from Topaz Adjust. It's a five-image blend.
I have to admit to liking this one quite a bit. There could be a little less saturation, but overall not too bad!
And finally, an image processed with Photomatix, another software program for creating HDR images, and one considerably more expensive that Picturenaut.
On the whole, it really is fun to process HDR images and see what one can come up with. It adds a different dimension to photography. While I don't particularly care for the colors of the image generated by Photomatix, it could easily be tamed down for a more natural looking image. However, the over saturation does kind of draw your eye into an otherwise boring composition.
Okay, I couldn't resist. One more...