If you are going to do HDR, Photoshop's implementation is decent. If you use Photomatix, it does the same thing, but renders differently. If you've ever seen an HDR with the crazy surface patterns, it's a good bet that it was done in Photomatix.
It's a dark art to do it well. Whole books have been written on how to make HDRs. You'll really need to have a vision of what you are looking for, or all you'll be doing is moving sliders in software. On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 8:01 PM, Larry Colen <[email protected]> wrote: > The dynamic range of the K-5 is amazing, but making use of it is not trivial. > Both yesterday and today, I got some photos of the river gorge, with some > cloud action going on in the background. When I shot them, I bracketed, but > rather than using photoshops HDR feature I fussed, fumbled and frobbed the > controls in lightroom to try to keep detail in both the sky and the valley. > > I'm almost satisfied with the way that this one came out: > http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/5559355279/in/set-72157626352846496/ > > The challenge seems to come from there basically being a bi-modal > distribution, where I've got a lot of pixels all of the way to the right of > the histogram, and another bunch all of the way to the left. I almost need a > tone curve that is very steep on the right 10% of the values, and then more > or less linear to that point, or possibly also fairly steep on the left, > flattish in the middle and steep on the right. > > I'm sure that the way to do this involves both exposing to get the shot, and > then some specific tricks in lightroom to pull out the data. Any suggestions > folks? Or am I much better off just using photoshops HDR tools, and getting > a wide bracket? > > I did try putting the camera in bracket (about two stops), setting the meter > on the sky in Manual, composing, taking my bracketed shots, then hitting the > green button to bracket on the foreground, so I've got two sets of bracketed > shots, one for the sky and one for the foreground. > > > > -- > Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est > > > > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. > -- David Parsons Photography http://www.davidparsonsphoto.com Aloha Photographer Photoblog http://alohaphotog.blogspot.com/ -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
