43/365: Last Shot of the Day

It's always in the last place you look. After walking around for an hour yesterday, shooting a few good shots here and there, this is the last shot I get before I reach my car...

Really, I didn't need to use any HDR for this shot. It looked great straight out of the camera: it was that time of day when the sky is deep blue, and the stars are just beginning to put on their makeup. The light from the sky balances with the artificial light sources in the parking lot, and the warmth of the tungsten blubs contrasts nicely with the blue. But feeding the sequence into the HDR machine created both delights and problems. The walls, bushes and parking lot took on great texture and interesting contrast, but the sky and the area around the street light looked horrible, very oversaturated and fringy in contrast. The smooth blue sky was now a weird series of tones and the highlight of the street lamp was no longer a highlight. This is a common problem with HDR tonemapping.

So I did what I often do with HDRs. I ran the nasty tonemapping and only paid attention to the areas I liked, then combined that image with one of my original images in Photoshop. Basically you stack the two images, one over the other, then paint away the areas you don't want to keep, or do want to keep, depending on which image is on top. In this case I painted in the areas I liked from the HDR: the textured walls, the parking lot, and the bushes below the light. The trees and the sky I kept from the original exposure. This is , in my opinion, an example of a soft-handed approach to the whole HDR thing: it's not very obvious that it actually is HDR, although there's some areas in the shot that do give it away.

I will often use this approach to fix the areas that HDR tonemapping just doesn't get right for me. In this example, the delivery truck looked too dark in the tonemapped image (Which makes sense, even though it's white. Remember, HDR takes the lightest values in an images and brings them down closer to a middle tone). So I combined the tonemapped version with one of the brighter shots in the sequence, again masking out the truck in the HDR and using the 'normal' shot underneath.

And in this shot of Elmo's Diner, I liked the HDR treatment of the building, but the sky was unnecessarily grainy and noisy, another side effect of the process. So I used the sky from one of the original shots.

I will admit that most of time, I gravitate to these more subtle approaches to HDR. But that doesn't mean that the heavy-handed, obviously-processed approach is any less valid. It's all a matter of personal preference. I'll try some with that approach soon I think.

What do you think of these images? Good, bad, interesting, boring? Sound out in the comments.

Happy Friday to all,

-llg