I "rescued" a bunch of arum lilies out of a dustbin a few months ago and had this idea of photographing them using the painting with light technique. This weekend a got the time to do it. I got so carried away photographing these beauties, that I only managed to drag myself to bed at 02:00 (AM!).
I have seen quite a number of photos claiming to be High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos , and some of my photo club members managed to get good results with their HDR rendered photos.
In Wikipedia HDR and traditional photography is compared as follows: "Information stored in high dynamic range images usually corresponds to the physical values of luminance or radiance that can be observed in the real world. This is different from traditional digital images, which represent colors that should appear on a monitor or a paper print. Therefore, HDR image formats are often called "scene-referred", in contrast to traditional digital images, which are "device-referred" or "output-referred". Furthermore, traditional images are usually encoded for the human visual system (maximizing the visual information stored in the fixed number of bits), which is usually called "gamma encoding" or "gamma correction". The values stored for HDR images are often linear, which means that they represent relative or absolute values of radiance or luminance (gamma 1.0)." (see http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging)
A few months ago a had the opportunity to take some "mist photos", and because of the high contrast between the sky and the foreground I decided to bracket the photos. After a discussion about HDR photos with one of my club members this week, I decided to try a few third party tools in the creation of a tone mapped HDR photo. Maybe it is time to upgrade my photographic toolset...
For this I downloaded the following 4 software packages:
Photomatix 3.0 (http://www.hdrsoft.com/) - US$99.00
Dynamic Photo HDR 3.43 (http://www.mediachance.com/) - US$55.00
Picturenaut 2.12 (http://www.hdrlabs.com/picturenaut/) Free ware
FDR Tools Advanced 2.2 (http://www.fdrtools.com) – 49 Euro (Note that FDRTools also has a basic version available for free – the basic version only includes the global tone mapping algorithms.)
Let's compare some of the features:
Feature | Photomatix | Dynamic Photo HDR | Picturenaut | FDR Tools |
Alignment of photos | X | X | X | X |
| Read Raw files | X | X | | X |
| Automatic reduction of noise | X | X | X | X |
| Reducing of ghosting | X | X | | X |
| Global tone mapping | X | X | X | X |
| Local tone mapping | X | X | | X |
| Plug in API | | | X | |
| Use Exif info | X | X | X | X |
| Use ICC profiles | X | X | X | X |
| Interactive tone mapping screen | X | X | X | X |
| User defined gamma encoding | X | X | X | X |
| Using camera curve | | | X | |
| Layered exposure compensation | | | | X |
| De-Ghosting masks | | X | | |
The features mentioned above is by no means a full list of each product's feature set, but just those to give you a feel of the depth of the package.
Although all these packages can create HDR images, it seems like the most important part of any HDR image processing package is the included tone mappers. Tone mapping is the technique to map the HDR image (32/64 bit image) back to a displayable 8/16 bit image.
Photomatix is well known for its local tone mapping. Local tone mapping is a great tool but in the wrong hands will result in a final image that looks unnatural. There is a great following for this "new" (overcooked) look. Personally I prefer the more traditional look of a photo.
Here are the results of my first endeavours into the use of HDR software:
Photomatix |
|
| Of all the images, the Photomatix image showed the most noise and I had to tweak it quite a bit to get rid of some halos around the trees. I think that it will be possible to get a good looking photo to do some post processing on using this software. |
Dynamic Photo HDR |
|
| There was much less noise in this photo than in the photomatix photo. It did not look as sharp as the Photomatix version which is most likely an indication of some serious automatic noise reduction. I think that one will be able to get the same results with this software as with the Photomatix software. |
Picturenaut |
|
| The Picturenaut photo looks much more natural and will be a good starting point for some post processing. This more natural result is due to the fact that it does not do any local tone mapping. By using global tone mapping with the above two packages one will most likely get the same results. |
FDR Tools Advanced |
|
| The preview of the FDR Tools photo did not match the resultant saved image. The saved image was much brighter that what I saw on the screen while doing the tone mapping. I hope that was just a result of my lack of knowledge of the software. I had to open the photo in Photoshop Elements and adjust the levels before saving the jpeg version. I did not use the local tone mapping algorithm of this package as it was not the default setting. |
Once I've created the 4 photos with these packages, I decided to fall back to my old trusted manual methods to see how close I can get to having a pleasing higher dynamic range photo that will compare with those created in the HDR tools. I ended up using only two exposers of the seven and used the basic tools of masking, dodging and burning to come up with an image that I think does compare with the ones created with the tools - see the photo at the top of this review.
Footnote: In all fairness keep in mind that I did not modify the HDR tone mapped images in Photoshop (except for the levels of the FDR Tools version) while I did quite a bit of dodging and burning on my manual manipulated image. If I spend some time post processing each HDR image, I am sure that I will get a much more pleasing photo than those shown here – I may even get a better looking photo than my standard Photoshop manipulated version.
The tools were quite impressive, but I think that I will stick with my old and trusted ways – at least for now.
