First HDR attempt, suggestions?

[KTHXBAI]

Hey everyone. Well this is my first attempt at HDR. It's not the best shot but I really just wanted to experiment with the feature. I must say I really like the fact that you can customize the detail. It really made the gate pillar stick out nicely.

This shot was taken today around 8:30pm. It is the Allegheny Cemetery in PGH.

Please take a look at the picture and if you have any tips please feel free to let me know. I have a feeling that much of this is kinda experimental and just see what works.

I used 3 images at F/5 , f10, f4 at .5 sec. I played with the levels and removed ghosting. Once I put in CS5 I used an unsharp mask and a reduce noise.

Does anyone see any major problems? Also should I be using unsharp mask with these? I feel that detail kind of gives it a halo as is?

Thanks

[Colin Southern]

Hi Michael,

Just one quick thing ... try to avoid bracketing by varying the aperture, as it creates problems with different depths of field, and other technical things.

The 2nd thing I was going to mention is that the saturation of a colour changes with how bright it is - and because if this, many HDR programs tend to over-saturate colours, as is the case here (and also some colour shifts). At a minimum, you still need to post-process these images normally once you're done the HDR conversion. Think of HDR conversion finishing at a point where you'd normally start with normal dynamic range images.

Hope this helps

[KTHXBAI]

Thanks Colin,

That helps tremendously. I thought HDR you bracketed by S not A priority. Obviously i got the two mixed up. I will try to research some more and give it another shot.

Thanks you for your help!