My first HDR!

[orlcam88]

This is my first HDR attempt. I took this in 3 rapid shots. 1 normal and the other 2, 2 stops below and above normal.
One thing I noticed is the halo around the buildings. I couldn't figure out how to fix this.
The other observation is, I should had waited until the light was red! luckily the vehicles didn't move much.

The red tint is from the screens along the buildings. I didn't want to change this so this is how it appears in person...almost.

[dje]

Nice shot Orlando with good clarity and detail. I believe the halos could be caused by the HDR processing. Some software may be better than others in this regard. You could probably clone it out manually as there isn't too much of it there.

Dave

[dubaiphil]

Nice shot, Orlando

With HDR you're obviously trying to capture more dynamic range than the camera can cope with in one single exposure. In high contrast areas you will get halos by default. Which software did you use?

With most HDR software you can play around with settings to try to minimise this. One type of HDR that I frequently use for night shots with high contrast is Exposure Fusion. This gives a more subtle result and results in less halos. Photomatix has this as an option, as do several other off the shelf HDR programs I believe.

Because you're dealing with such extremes of light and dark in brightly lit night scenes, you may need to adjust the exposures that you're shooting. In some extreme cases I'm shooting up to 8 exposures in 1EV intervals, aiming on the under exposure side more (i.e. -5EV, -4EV, -3EV, -2EV, -1EV, 0EV, +1EV, +2EV). Having a bias towards under exposure means that the bright light sources are so under exposed at -5EV that the 'leakage' around the light sources is minimised. I still have the +2EV exposure at the other end of the scale to bring out the shadow detail, but the -5EV image will show next to no detail except around the bright light sources. This helps to reduce halos further when processing in the HDR software, reducing time spend manually cloning out the halos later.