Pixlmixr's photostream  

Terminal Tower and Key Bank from the Abbey St. Bridge, through the links, on a day too fine to be January. HDR from three handheld exposures.

2011 was a great year for fall colors in Cleveland. This is a composite of three exposures from a little point-and-shoot Canon A3300 without a tripod.

Telephoto HDR of the industrial area just east of the intersection of Quigley and Clark. A 12 exposure composition made with ALE, Darktable, Luminance, GIMP and G'mic. 18 x telephoto. At more than a third of a mile the street sign at the intersection is clearly legible.

High Dynamic Range (HDR) macro composed from 9 exposures. It was a windy day to attempt exact registration, even with a tripod, so ALE software (version 0.8.11.2) came in handy to align the images. It compensates for motion like translation and rotation and takes different exposure levels into account, great for auto-bracketing. ALE produces a silky smooth image that completely hides jpeg artifacts, and output can be scaled up for the final image. ALE outputs the common 8 bit format found in jpeg and the much richer 16 bit format you can use in HDR capable programs like Darktable Luminance, and Krita. This one started out as a 16 bit TIFF from ALE. Then I "developed" a few versions to 8 bit PNG's using Darktable. Darktable has may features of its own. As you tweak your 16 bit image into an 8 bit version, the preview and histogram update continuously so you have very fine grained control. Finally, I used GIMP to stack the versions I generated with Darktable and used various G'Mic filters (local normalization, tone mapping, bilateral smoothing) to complete the image.

A view southwest near the eastern terminus of Clark, before it desckends to the industrial lowlands. HDR from 11 exposures, accomplished with the Ale image processing software. Tonal balance and normalization courtesy of G'mic in gimp.