My first HDR

[ochinko]

Hi again. I would like to hear your comments about what I did today. I apologize for the quality of the picture - it was either that or ugly suburban buildings so it is shot with the maximum (18x) zoom of my compact camera.

Also, instead of with bracketing it is made from a single shot with -1, 0, and +1 exposure corrections from the raw file. And I utilized another technique as well - decomposing the picture in LAB space, and recomposing it after overlaying the A and B channels with their copies.

I wasn't able to get around those cables that cross the picture, unfortunately.

I hope I didn't overdo anything as one tends to do with the new toys. So this is the original:


And here is the result of my editing:


Any criticism is welcome.

[atvinnys]

I got say, for once, an HDR that looks natural, so from my point of view, good start..
I am no expert, but it seems the landscape is a little bit washed out...
I wonder if you would have achieved a better result with a +2 overexposure to get more out of those darker regions...oh wait...just reread your post...given you played with just one Raw file, guess you were limited...bracketing the exposures themselves would probably have given you more room to play with...

Also, w/o using HDR, couldn't you simply play with gamma/brightness, dark recovery, etc?

[ochinko]

Thanks for your input. It certainly looks washed out but such is the season and the place. This was one of the days with the least fog from the last couple of months. The small houses are quite distant so the fog accumulates. I'll be able to try a better shot when the air is cleaner since this view is from my flat here. Next time I could try bracketing as well.

I don't think you can bring the details from the lightest and the darkest parts without significant loss in the other part of the lightness scale by playing with gamma, brightness, etc. The tone mapping programs (I use Qtpfsgui, btw) don't work on the whole image but divide it into zones with different brightness, and afterwards paste them together. This seems possible to be done by hand, but quite tedious, and would require a lot of work to make the zone transitions smooth.

I know the picture isn't worth much so it is not surprising to get only one comment, but I have one further question, this time a compositional one. Given that there is no focal point in it would you rather prefer to have something in the foreground even if it is not much more appealing?

Like these here that I didn't PP except for some cropping and scaling: