Sunset HDR

[Deleted member 95430]

Content Deleted

 

[TimHughes]

Sunset HDR is a marmite thing I think. Personally I’d go with the -2 and lift the shadows a bit so some more of the foreground detail is visible. More exposures will give you more options. Usually I find I get better results by working with the best exposure than trying to generate an HDR image.

 

[LongLensPhotography]

Sunset HDR is a marmite thing I think. Personally I’d go with the -2 and lift the shadows a bit so some more of the foreground detail is visible. More exposures will give you more options. Usually I find I get better results by working with the best exposure than trying to generate an HDR image.

1. -100 highlights +100 shadows (or close) kind of gets the job done but results are invariably vomit inducing or to put it mildly look very tonemapped which is the negative aspect of your awful looking 'HDR' from the old days. It pretty typically comes down to a lot of local adjustments and blending frames whether working from individual frames or HDR composite file.
2. HDR merge does not have any effect on the final result, other than cleaned up shadows and retained higlights and the negatives include ghosting, potentially quite bad and a lot of it. Watch out for trees, cars, people etc. Chances are you will manually need to clean up from one of the frames.

These highlights are super strong and bright and it involves a lot of steps to keep them under control. This light doesn't add anything to the scene, let alone the scene doesn't look very interesting. In the first instance get the timing and composition in order and you may not need any of that.

 

[Sangoma]

Just playing with my Fuji X-T30 with a decent sunset outside my window. I don't have the newest capture one so did the HDR in affinity photo. In the -2 picture the sky has some deep oranges and this information is lost even in the HDR. The foreground looks good as expected. Is sunset hdr another skill on top of normal hdr? I metered manually with the reveni spot for the 0 exposure then took a -2, 0 and +2

Would more brackets improve it all can more be done in post with a better program more time? Would the deep orange sky look weird with the lightened foreground anyway?

Thanks!

Personally I like HDR, simply because a photograph often does not look like the scene I saw.
However, I don't think it works with your scene and what you were trying to do.
For a street scene, it works well, enabling you to see into the shadows on a photograph in a similar way to how your eyes did at the time of taking the photo.
For a sunset scene it works well, allowing you to see on the photograph the cloud detail and colour your eyes saw at the time.

But for me, the combination doe not look "right". Had the street had less detail, or had it been a field instead of a street, it would have looked better to the eye.

When I look at something, I see vivid colours (unless it is a cloudy day )that are often not quite there in the photograph, and I can see detail in the shadows and bright areas, which are often not so clear in a photograph.

Some photographs I take to record something, and some I take to remember something, HDR can be an advantage in both, but the final results would be different.

I have seen HDR shots which are technically "perfect" and the only fault is that they don't look "good", they look flat and boring.

Technically good can be rated objectively, but looking good is subjective, make them how you like them, and how they look right to you. Many people will like them, and some people won't.
Take note of the comments, and if they match what you were hoping to achieve, use them, if not, stick to what you like, most likely your style will change over time and end up somewhere in the middle

Totally non-professional opinion from some one who likes HDR.

For sunsets/rise I usually use -2 0 +2 and for streets where I want to see into the shadows I use -2 -1 0 +1 +2

Affinity works well, and Fusion works well for dramatic sky shots

 

[Deleted member 95430]

1. -100 highlights +100 shadows (or close) kind of gets the job done but results are invariably vomit inducing or to put it mildly look very tonemapped which is the negative aspect of your awful looking 'HDR' from the old days. It pretty typically comes down to a lot of local adjustments and blending frames whether working from individual frames or HDR composite file.
2. HDR merge does not have any effect on the final result, other than cleaned up shadows and retained higlights and the negatives include ghosting, potentially quite bad and a lot of it. Watch out for trees, cars, people etc. Chances are you will manually need to clean up from one of the frames.

These highlights are super strong and bright and it involves a lot of steps to keep them under control. This light doesn't add anything to the scene, let alone the scene doesn't look very interesting. In the first instance get the timing and composition in order and you may not need any of that.

Oh yeah i just stuck the camera out of my window to see what i could do with the exposure- thats why i left the giant scaffolding pole in ha

 

[Dave Canon]

I rarely use HDR now as my more recent cameras have good dynamic range. However, for a sunset/sunrise I would but no longer use traditional HDR software. Lightroom will combine multiple exposures to produce a 32 bit (floating point) file which can then be edited with the normal basic controls in LR. However the range of each control is much extended. The results are more natural as most HDR software distorts the colours but LR does not.

Dave

 

[yzfmike]

Totally agree with Dave Cannon. Traditional HDR s/w has its place (eg night/dusk citiscapes) but for sunsets it's easy to become seduced by the more extreme effects available. If I do the processing in the evening then look at my results after a night's sleep, I think WTF?!
Blending in LR gives a lovely, natural gradation to work on using the normal sliders.