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Amir In Wonderland

Posted by Persian King (Tehran, Iran) on 5 October 2007 in Landscape & Rural and Portfolio.

Fort Worth, TX

This was made from five bracketed images, stacked to form an HDR. Those of you who come here often, know that I don't have a DSLR and my little Canon camera is not that professional and therefore can't bracket images. But not to worry, I used the Canon Digic II hack known as CHDK to enable the camera to do just that.

I took five images, -2, -1, 0, +1, +2 and then imported them into Photomatix, which is a dedicated HDR software. I had it stack the shots, then use its Tone Mapping function to create the surreal effect. I then imported it to Photoshop and fixed the curves, levels and hue/saturation. And here you see the result.

There are two kinds of HDR. One is real HDR, like the one here, made of couple of images with varying exposure compensation levels. And there is fake HDR, which is comprised of single image, usually taken in RAW format and then manipulated.

The Fake version is usually noisy because the data is not there to begin with, but in the case of real one the image is usually data rich and you get cleaner outcome.

So why not use the real one at all times! To answer this question one has to evaluate the situation. If the subject is stationery and motionless, then bracketing is favored, considering tripod is available. But if you are intended to take an HDR image of lets say, traffic intersection, then one RAW image should be all you need, or I should say all you can have.

Obviously the bracketed HDR has better and clearer results, but has its limitations.

See the original at Flickr

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