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Simple Photo Blending
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*Pauly*Bear* [deleted] says:
I do something like this, but I have found a way to make the dark exposure a little "richer". Try this and tell me what you think.
1. Do a duplicate layer of the orginal photo.
2. Set the blend on Multiply and about 50% opacity.
You should have a pretty rich Dark exposure. Try plugging that exposure into the blending formula. (What I also like doing is, auto level the rich Dark exposure before I move on...sometimes you can get some intresting effects)
Pauly
Posted 70 months ago.
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You might also wanna try combining your separate exposures using Cinepaint (formerly filmGimp) into an HDR image, then trying out some cool tone-mapping algorithms. If you are careful about your exposures, you can produce some really interesting effects:
This was 8 different exposures, all about 1 stop apart, combined in Cinepaint, and tone mapped with pfstmo, fattal.
Produces some neat results!
Originally posted 70 months ago.
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avhell edited this topic 70 months ago.
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avhell,
The image does not look very "real" to me. HDR does not do a good job in giving a good exposure without getting the "technicolor" look of film.
Claudio
Posted 70 months ago.
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*Pauly*Bear* [deleted] says:
But I think that is the idea. I could see the HDR trick for something on a sales cover. It would be a neat way to make your product stick out. Very intresting.
Pauly
Posted 70 months ago.
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Well, AFAIK, the interest in HDR-related tools is not to produce some real looking image, but more `interesting effects' as avhell said :)
(And to nit-pick : it's not HDR that does not do a good job, but the process used to convert an HDR image into a normal/LDR one )
In general I like the painting effect it gives. (except on clouds, most of the time I think coulds look ugly - though on avhell example they are ok )
Posted 70 months ago.
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*Pauly*Bear* [deleted] says:
Another cool thing to do is to throw a gadient layer into the blend mix.
For example, lets say I want to make my sky a more blue. Well, somewhere in my layers of dark and light exposures, I will throw in a blue to white (or black, it depends what I am looking for) graidient pattern.
If you play around with the opacity levels, you can get a very good look.
This one here, I did a blue/green graident to white.
Posted 70 months ago.
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Yeah, I probably should have pointed out that I purposely over-saturated the image and bumped the contrast range on purpose to get that "painted" look to the image. My bad :(
rore hit the nail on the head. The HDR image does not "look" any certain way in and of itself, its just holding ALOT of data concerning the light in the scene. It's the tone-mapping that will ultimately compress the high dynamic range to something that can be displayed on our output devices.
Here is a gorgeous example:
And another that is much more "natural":
I think what happens is that we are so accustomed to seeing photographs at such a low dynamic range compared to what we can perceive through our eyes, that when an image begins to show us similar effects, we judge it as being "hyper-real" compared to other photos.
In fact, these are much closer to the dynamic range that we can "see". The problem usually arises in tone-mapping local dynamic range changes...
Anyway, just realized this turned into a dissertation. Sorry. :( In reality, the process that Eszra is describing is more or less a manual tone-mapping of an HDR image, akin to "burning and dodging" film photos in the darkroom. Still a great technique, and valuable for a photographers bag of tricks.
Originally posted 70 months ago.
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avhell edited this topic 70 months ago.
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Yay, thanks for the tips! I'm going to try this right away!
Btw, I'm new here.. Just wanted to say hi!
Posted 70 months ago.
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Amazing indeed: www.flickr.com/photos/giannes/208865942/
it's look great and not overdone. Best HDR I have seen so far.
Claudio
Posted 70 months ago.
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I use another simple method for blending with GIMP (which is not HDR as you do not augment the range, but just replace the over/under exposed part of the shot with normally exposed parts).
Here is the result:
The first thing I do is to align all the different exposure with hugin.sf.net as I don't always have a tripod to take the multiple shots and exports to a layered image that I can open in GIMP.
Next, I put the layer with the most interesting part at the bottom and stack the other exposures on top (the order is not particularly important, you might play with it to find the one that's best for you).
In that shot, I had 4 exposures, but if you only have 3, duplicate the bottom layer and put it on top of all the other ones.
Next, add layer mask to all layer except the bottom one. Check grayscale version of the layer and for the bright exposure check also "invert".
Now, adjust the transparency of each layer and edit the masks (not always necessary) if you want to exclude something that was not automatically excluded.
You might also want to adjust the contrast, brightness and saturation of the top and bottom layer to boost a bit the colour (that will probably be faded a bit by the process).
Here is another shot composed from a similar technique:
There I didn't have multiple exposure of the same subject, but a "panoramic" with different exposures for each shot.
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Personally, I find that most of the HDR I see on flickr are disappointing, but I have seen very interesting ones without these strange clouds and glows around the foreground subjects.
I would like to try it sometime.
Originally posted 70 months ago.
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mortimer? edited this topic 70 months ago.
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Thanks for the Tip on Hugin Mortimer. Here's one I was able to do using it for alignment:
Posted 70 months ago.
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