Always impressive Rob. I think a before and after would be cool. Did you shoot all three exposures, or just tweak one source image in RAW?
Thanks Nathan. It is in fact 3 bracketed exposures (I wish Canon would allow 5 exposures like some Nikons!). The baseline image used a roughly average exposure metering -- I measured the sky, the ground and the truck's paint then split the difference (shot in Manual mode) -- then auto bracketing set to +/- 2EV took care of the others. I set each exposure to the same white balance/color temp in ACR (leaving all other RAW conversion settings at the default) and saved each as a TIF file, which I then used to process in dphdr. After generating the HDR and tone mapping it, I saved as a TIF and went back to CS3 for final post processing (curves, contrast, color, sat, spot editing (dodge/burn), etc. Probably 30 minutes total processing time.
Heh ... thanks Aaron.
I don't understand any of what he did, but I like the results!
lol. That's okay ... if you did you'd probably just say I use Photoshop as a crutch and that I should be getting good photos straight from the camera versus through software. ;-)
Rob,
Nice work!
If you would not mind, I also would like to see the raw files for some of the images that you have been posting.
Thanks Nathanael. I will post up at least the baseline (0 EV) image later, if not all three.
Threadjacking for a second, here's another HDR I did the same afternoon (it's actually what I was shooting before turning the camera on my truck) and the baseline (0 EV) original straight from the camera. This one is 5-exposures (+/- 2EV), again metering the baseline from an average exposure reading. The HDR version is intentionally stylistic -- i.e., I didn't process it to look "real", but rather wanted the HDR look because I thought it fitting for the subject in addition to be a truly high dynamic range scene (at least 8 stops of light).
ETA:
Here's a quick animated gif I threw together which shows the 3 exposures then final HDR. I can post 'em up individually, and bigger, if anyone really cares.
