where there’s smoke there’s forum fire
OK, being very ignorant, but having been asked if the following was HDR, I thought I would post these two images. Not HDR, but as I work on all my images in Lightroom 4, this is the result I finally had showing the initial and final image.
I do not really know much about HDR, but would it make a big difference in this shot? I tend to try for an image we used to call "camera ready" as in ready for the person doing the color separations.
msmoto said:
OK, being very ignorant... I tend to try for an image we used to call "camera ready" as in ready for the person doing the color separations.
I think describing your process in 'Teach a trinck' would be fantastic. I would like to compare it with mine. Your bottom-right blue car has definitely a fluorescent tone-mapping look to it.
I sometime feel compelled to mention 'not an HDR' in some of my posts.
I'm of the opinion that HDR is a tool that allows a photographer to do things they otherwise would not be able to do under normal circumstances.
The picture below illustrates that point. Being an HDR the image is able to maintain detail in all areas while still respecting the individual sources of light. I liked the spot lights on the books in particular.
Welcome EricsCamera! I was surprised to recognize your photo from FB. :D
@Proudgeek: Thanks for going to that trouble and I agree with your post. I just played with your images in LR4 and the lake is easily do-able without exporting, but I can't do the canyon justice. I used the brush to reduce exposure of the floor a little, then did a global small exposure reduction followed by bringing up the shadows - it looked good, but I couldn't get the edge between shadows and highlights (on the floor) right which layers or exporting to HDR software does.
@msmoto: Now this has got me thinking. The balance of the colours in your picture is strange - kind of like Fujifilm was when compared to Kodak - which is one of the effects that I see in HDRs sometimes. It is possible that prompted the question about whether the picture was an HDR. Maybe making the temperature more blue would bring that back. If you wanted the old car to 'pop' again you could apply the original temperature locally with the brush?
I cant see it Seven - the greens still look a bit yellow on there too?
Here is what I was referring to. NO HDR - Massive LR4 Edit only. This could have been a good candidate for HDR but I was shooting handheld and passing through - No time for a tripod, etc.
Original file:
True confessions.... I agree, the final shot of the old cars is yellow. My suspicion is this is a tendency of mine to go toward a warmer tone than is accurate due to a personal preference and an intrinsic "feel" for the original impression of the cars. I will look at the image and try to bring the final back into a more "accurate" color.
And this is close.
A learning point. I am currently operating out of a motorhome. the lighting around my editing station is variable, not a good thing when attempting to maintain consistency. I will need to work on setting up some type of ambient light monitoring so as to be more consistent.
well "HDR style" photography is a big part of my thing, though i dont do real hdr, i do process like an HDR. one photo can take me anywhere from a few hours to a few days to process.
I can't stand HDR which has no shadows. too many people using HDR eliminate all shadows, and therefore all depth, subtlety and realism from the photo. I particularly dislike real estate shots that have just had a quick edit and look completely false. having just bought a house, i'll say that hdr made me NOT want to look at properties rather than the reverse.
HDR has a place, but i'll be happy to see the end of this current HDR everything fad.
msmoto said:
I am currently operating out of a motorhome. the lighting around my editing station is variable, not a good thing when attempting to maintain consistency. I will need to work on setting up some type of ambient light monitoring so as to be more consistent.
One solution is to take a test shot with a grey card
Then use the W/B dropper in LR . If the results "look odd" you may need to calibrate your monitor but you using a grey card should ensure consistency
Pierre, well stated. The piece I keep back to is the story that the photographer wishes to tell. Software that exploits the full range of light in an image may help that photographer tell that story, develop a particular style or push the state of the art and demonstrate various capabilities. If software is like a brush, then some are good at painting the story while others are not so good. Some may like a style and some may not like the same style. What I react to are things like "HDR is not photography". Such blanket statements get us nowhere.
Have fun.
sevencrossing said:
One solution is to take a test shot with a grey card
Then use the W/B dropper in LR . If the results "look odd" you may need to calibrate your monitor but you using a grey card should ensure consistency
Some days I have to laugh at myself... so, I go to my Flickr page and download my own photo of this so now it sits on my desktop and I can use it as reference when finalizing a photo. On my monitor the lower left corner looks to be a clean white.
@Gareth... I would like your candid opinion of the old car shot above. You may share this with all on the forum, good, bad , or indifferent. It would be good learning I believe.
The greens are much better now and the blue car still 'pops' so it's better than the first go (I think) msmoto.
Well, this thread is useful. I agree with most of what has been said and am already getting better results than before just because nobody has said 'oh yeah, it's just not possible to get realistic results using HDR software because...' which I took to mean I was wrong in my summary of it.
It seems from your kind postings that (in summary) the trick is to only use it when it is necessary, only do the minimum (unless you want the grunge look - which is valid use too) and not remove all the dynamic range.
@Mikewhis: Tell me more about using the exposure fusion part of Photomatix please?
I don't personally care for the full on Trey Ratcliff style HDR shots. It's a nice novelty, but it gets old when everyone and their dog starts doing it.
I do use HDR for indoor architecture shots. I prefer to light rooms with the natural window lighting when possible (perhaps with a flash or two wedged inside a light fixture). My eyes don't blow out the highlights coming through the window, so why should my camera? I think as cameras get closer to what our own eyes are capable of, you'll see HDR start to go away.
Over the weekend, we took the D800 to a handful of painted churches out by Shulenburg TX (you must go check this out if you live near Houston \ Austin). The churches were lit with only the light that shown through the stain glass windows, and I was amazed at what it returned straight out of camera. I may never shoot HDR again.
Let me just start by saying that there are many good post here (either for or against HDR... or even just in-between) but I think from between all the posts, I agree most with Pierre's.
Here is a question, do you consider photography to be an artform or a documentary method? I don't think there is anything wrong with either but depending on what your purpose is, your photography style and tastes will be different. Photography, to me, is an artform more than anything else. When I take a photo, I don't so much seek to express what my subject looks like as much as I tend to express what I see (EDIT: vision is probably a better word). I suppose it's a way for me to leave my fingerprint on the world around me. So in answering the main question of this thread; no, I don't think HDR is passé... at least not to me. And while I do love some of the unrealistic looks that can be achieved with HDR, I do admit that I've seen some HDR photos that even I consider to be freaky. To each their own maybe... or could even be a case of PS abuse. Who knows?
Here are some HDR photos I did when I first got into photography. I realize they're not that great and could be improved in a thousand different ways but I'm just posting them to illustrate what I usually like... oh and this was before my Nikon days sooo... sorry!
Beautiful iris chrome. Good point about the loss of shadow Gareth, something to remember. You definitely got a good point about shadow rendering spraynspay, this is what computers are for no? Tedious pixel-level tasks.
As an answer to yetibudha or simply for the sake of seeing how far we could push the subject...
There are photos that are not art at all, we probably can all agree on that.
There are photos that are art which I think can be put in two bins, touched and untouched.
One can retouch a photo so much that it will stop being photography altogether and become simply art or savage disfiguration, we probably can agree on that too.
The transition between the non-art and the art is fuzzy as it would be impossible to get a consensus, even on the very definition of what art is. It may just boil down to you like vs you don't.
The transition between photography and non-photography is also very subjective but there is surely a point above which even the most open-minded will stop calling it a photo.
In the most extreme form of tonemapping done with say photomatik, the cartoon-like rendering has definitely a computer-generated look, which is literally just that despite starting the generation using a photo. Technically, all digital photos are computer generated even in the camera itself. The simple fact of adjusting exposure or white balance could be ultimately considered as a form of retouching. Perhaps there is no such a thing as an untouched digital photo beside using all of the factory defaults and full auto. Is tone mapping creating data or is it simply revealing entire layers of present info otherwise invisible?
Again we deal with a fuzzy boundary but there is a point above which the generation process will cease to produce photography.
If someone likes to turn people heads fluorescent blue, what would be the problem with just calling it art? When one would become offended if it is denied the photographic status? Of course if the 'Blue Men Group' was taken, it would fall in the untouched bin.
Perhaps the real question is 'when does it stop being suitable for the PAD' which somehow is supposed to be a Nikon capabilities showcase unless I am mistaking. It would be interesting to know at which point Nikon itself would become offended by the unintended usage of their equipment.
Personally, I would not like to be confined to untouched only, especially when the RAW contains so much harvestable data. The better the cameras become the more exploitable info it contains and the more room it leaves for artistic interpretation without having to put data that was not there in the first place. Perhaps this is the separation point between photo and non-photo. Who knows, maybe the D900 will offer an infrared and ultraviolet white balance choice. (No, I ain't starting D5/D900 rumours but I am almost tempted to open a thread :~)
If you wish to call my work just art, I don't mind neither :-)
So we are dealing with a full gamut here and perhaps we are not giving ourselves enough freedom.
Is this photography?
What ya think?
You make some good points well there Pierre:
Perhaps the real question is 'when does it stop being suitable for the PAD' which somehow is supposed to be a Nikon capabilities showcase unless I am mistaking. It would be interesting to know at which point Nikon itself would become offended by the unintended usage of their equipment.
I certainly hope that you are not right there Pierre. Perhaps this links to the thread Jonnyapple started about the reasons people contribute to NR, but I think that the images on PAD are not Nikon related other than they are taken with a Nikon product.
In the most extreme form of tonemapping done with say photomatix, the cartoon-like rendering has definitely a computer-generated look, which is literally just that despite starting the generation using a photo.
That is exactly what started me on this thread - as you said the cartoon look is OK if you are after that (and as said in previous posts) but if you just want the high dynamic range effect with a natural photo, things get more difficult (although not absolutely impossible it seems).
Is this photography?
I see it as an image made from photographs.
I work in 3D animation, and lately we've been using a lot of (true, 32-bit floating point!) high dynamic range images for image-based lighting. In that world, it's a fantastic technique.
In still photography, I'm really not certain I know why HDR would be "passe" when dodging and burning prints from film serves the same purpose. However, I would argue that it is probably worth the manual effort to choose how to mask and combine multiple images deliberately rather than using software on autopilot. The software tools out there tend to make choices that are a lot more visually complex and less appealing than what a human operator might do in Photoshop.
mark_wilkins said:...However, I would argue that it is probably worth the manual effort to choose how to mask and combine multiple images deliberately rather than using software on autopilot....
You can do both, introduce bits and pieces of generated and manually blend them with other conventional layers as in this one.
I woulds say about 90% of it was done with traditional technique and 10% of photomatix.
Quote: "Perhaps the real question is 'when does it stop being suitable for the PAD' which somehow is supposed to be a Nikon capabilities showcase unless I am mistaking. It would be interesting to know at which point Nikon itself would become offended by the unintended usage of their equipment." Thanks, Pierre
Yup, for sure this is a question I would ask myself. My thinking about this solely as an individual, not as a mod, is that what we see on PAD is more in keeping in line with what I see as "photography" and if I go over to some of the other "photographic" drop zones, I see a lot of manipulated work which may have started out as an optical image recorded in digital, then was transformed into an artistic 2 dimensional work of "art". Here on NRF, PAD, I think we see more true photographic work, and by that I mean images which capture the world as it is seen by most folks.
One of the most profound statements I have been given was by Gerhard Bakker, in 1965, when he said, possibly of my photo, "tried so hard to be different, forgot to be good." Think strong German accent, Layton School of Art, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA.
A thought might be to have a PAAD (Photo-Art-A-Day, but I do not find this an attractive idea as it drifts away from my more traditional ideas about photographs.......but, give me some time and I will struggle with the 4 zillion menu options in the camera and maybe find how to do an HDR shot, ha, ha, ha....
In my opinion every time you set the highlights slider to 0 and the shadows to 100 in LR4 you create a HDR image, with clever tone mapping the results can be the same as if you used Photomatix with multiple exposures (slightly more noise maybe).
@iris chrome - "Here is a question, do you consider photography to be an artform or a documentary method?"
Your question is thought provoking. I have long considered the digital age in photography as opening up a much broader spectrum of "photographic interpretation." In my opinion software enables us to simply process, process and enhance, or alter a photograph to the point of it becoming less a photograph and more an artistic graphic. While all forms of photographic processing may have their place, photography has always been and will continue to be an art form in my opinion.
I also do not think that the terms "art form" and "documentary method" need be mutually exclusive when referencing photography. Often a photograph intended to document something contains the art form elements in composition, lighting, perspective, exposure, etc. These aspects not only reflect the photographers knowledge and skill, but also artistic intent in the desired image.
While I believe serious photographers are constantly working to achieve the desired result at the time the photograph is taken, post processing (software) provides tools to overcome many missed elements. Personally, I appreciate photographs that capture a subject as it appears, not as someone would like it to appear. However, there are situations where the eye will wander to detail in shadows that may be obscured in a photograph by overly bright contrasting areas. HDR (or simply post processing software) can serve to bring these details into play in a composite that remains true to the subject matter.
Relevant to this discussion is human visual interpretation. My experience in attempting to achieve larger reproductions of digital photographs is that colors are often seen differently by other human beings as well as interpreted differently by monitors and printers. It is said that the images humans see are 10% to 20% optical through the human eye, and 80% to 90% interpretation by the brain based on experience and knowledge. Given these factors one may surmise that we see the same things differently, if only slightly, and that in itself blurs the line between artistry and documentary.
HDR can be so subtle as to defy conclusion and so prominent as to suggest an art form other than photography. Appreciation of each extreme is a personal choice.
I was talking to a crime scene photographer the other day and he said that he uses HDR on fingerprint photos because they show up so much better.
The question of whether we are picture makers or picture takers is as old as the art form itself and it tends to go in cycles. Right now, it seems like the audience is demanding "made" pictures. Look at the movies; every film lately has hundreds and hundreds of digital effects artists, compositors, and animators in the credits.
But of course, it all depends on your artistic vision. What you're trying to say with your camera and computer.
msmoto @Gareth... I would like your candid opinion of the old car shot above. You may share this with all on the forum, good, bad , or indifferent. It would be good learning I believe.
Sorry msmoto, i've been busy.
the thing with that shot, and with any shot, is a point of focus.
what do you want to show? I would probably have framed the original shot a bit differently, and that would have made more difference to the shot than post.
working with the shot you have. i like the blue car. i would crop in tighter on it and make it the obvious subject of the shot. your crop was an improvement, but still not enough IMO.
the blue sky is a bright contrast and my eye is drawn up there, i would crop that out and have the blue car at the lower right "rule of thirds" intersection.
I'd retain the bright blue HDR on the car, as that will draw the eye as a contrast to the darker green.
But why did you take a picture of that car? i'm guessing cos it was all beat up. your HDR killed the contrast and the gritty on the car. I would take it in to photoshop and brush the original (or a higher contrast copy) into the rust details.
you may find this useful
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