My First High Dynamic Range photograph

[elfs]

Afternoon Aftermath

This was my first deliberate attempt at creating a high dynamic range photograph, a photo in which several different photos of the same subject taken with different exposure rates are stacked to create a single image with a much higher range of colors than the camera can record with a single image.

While I'm not entirely happy with it, it has an interesting, moody feel to it that I really liked. I was surprised at how deep the darkness feels in this picture, which is not at all what I'd want to convey given the subject matter, but still, kinda nifty. The image is the result of only three photos, taken at the medium, high, and low exposures of a consumer-level Lumix camera, and then processed with the Hugin image processor in HDR mode.

Someday, when I'm rich, I'll have a much nicer camera and I'll be able to play with this more extensively.

Comments

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

If you think it's too dark, why not make it brighter? Looking at the histogram there, it's mostly bunched in toward the bottom. I brightened it up quickly with The Gimp's curves command; take a look:

It still feels dark, but a) it was a quick hack-job, and b) I don't have all of the original tonal information to do a

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

er, to do a full tonal mapping.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

That's kind of neat. It's the same kind of technique used by astronomers for years - take several pictures with different narrowband filters and stack them, producing a single image that shows the glow of several different ionized elements and where they are.

From the thumbnail though, I thought that was a too-short exposure of a little town in a snowy landscape. Looks neat though.