Night time HDR

[Flagpole]

Hi all,

Just thought I'll post some night time HDR I shot a few days ago. All were combined with Picturenaut. Then they were tone-mapped with Photomatic and post-processed in Photoshop CS. Tell me what you think.

Flagpole
Sydney, Australia

[palms]

well i like them, I havent even thought of night time shots are there any pointers you can give ?

Palms

[Flagpole]

Not many pointers. This was really my first try with HDRs at night as in general HDR is not my forte.

I mostly used 3 exposures with -1,0,+1 (13sec, 8sec, 5sec). On one or two I have blended 5 exposures from 20sec, 15sec, 13sec, 8sec, 5sec. Depending on the image it may be smoother compared to just 3 exposures and tends to bring sky out better.

The hardest part is that despite multiple exposures the histogram will be relatively left handed meaning still a lot of noise in shadows. It proved fairly hard to eliminate even with edge masking and may require quite a complex mask if you want to retain as much details as possible.

Also I had to lower gamma on most photos to bring them back into darker tones.

The other side effect of HDR merge is a really strange colour casts which can be difficult to neutralize completely.

At the end it is like depend on the subject itself. If the subject occupies main part of the frame and is relatively light against the dark background (sky or sea) then HDR will likely give you a slight edge by opening more tonicity in the subject. However if your subject is relatively small compared to the rest of the frame you are better off just bracketing your exposure and finding out which one seems to have a better overall feel then perhaps manually overlaying them over each other and using masking to blend by hand.

I am planning to go back and play with some other photos from the shoot later to see if I can get better results than with HDR.

Flagpole
Sydney, Australia