So I’ve been dying to try some HDR for quite a while now, but I was running an ancient operating system on my Mac that wouldn’t support the application I wanted to use. I’m finally running Leopard and gave HDR a whirl tonight. I did two images tonight as a test run. From this experience, I’ve found that there are two methods to process HDR and you can set set the tolerance of each, which produces dramatic results. I’ve found that it’s hard to produce really strong HDR images without a crapload of noise in full size images. I’ve also found that a moire effect is also easily produced. Granted, both of my images were produced from a single RAW file and this may not happen if I’d used multiple exposure images. But, alas, it was only a test run. And after I play around with it a bit more, I think I will find a pleasant HDR equilibrium at some point.
My 2 pennies, for what they are worth. HDR should only be used when it needs to be - there aren’t strong enough bright & dark area’s in this image to really show what it can do, all the HDR effect did was create the dreaded halo.
There are also a few thoughts on how to create the proper file, one is to shoot multiple exposures of the same shot, on a tripod - really hard to do with people. The second is to bracket expose in camera and combine later. The last is to take one RAW file and process it 6-10 times to get your exposure latitude and then do HDR with those TIF files.
I’ve played around with PhotoMatix which does a decent job of creating an HDR image from a single RAW file all in one easy step, but I still think that HDR should be saved for those images from which it will benefit from. I really like the photo, the HDR doesn’t do anything for it though.