Industrial HDR's

[Baddog]

First time poster to HDR group.

These are a couple of HDR's shot two days ago near my home in Australia.
Done in photomatix (older V2).
http://baddog.smugmug.com/photos/328597070_sPEuq-M.jpg
http://baddog.smugmug.com/photos/328596941_hic7B-M.jpg
http://baddog.smugmug.com/photos/328596694_98GG3-M.jpg

hope you like them,

Steve

[saby]

Good work Baddog I pefere 1st

[palms]

Hi and welcome Steve
Love your images, I am with Saby, all though all are good prefer the first one, the closer crop seems to work better than that in the second

Palms

[Svencool]

I likem in the order that you have them 123 Nice shots

[crazyfly1]

Yup 1,2,3. I really like the sky and the way everything is that steele grey.
The first one reminds me of a Half-life2 screen cap. Watch for head crabs!

[Baddog]

Thanks for your comments everyone. Glad you liked them.
I prefer the closer cropped first one too (no. 1). The clouds were pretty awesome this day with sunrays shining through.

Its bitterly cold here right now (middle of winter) so I quickly shot all of these from out my car window just to get some core shots to practice what I learnt from watching Ben Willmore's DVD on HDR mastery.
Once the weather warms a bit I'll be looking for more subjects to try this technique on.

A few more are on my website if interested, including larger versions.
http://baddog.smugmug.com/gallery/45...71790999_DJeEX

[palms]

Again some great images Steve, can you give a bit of info on how, like how many bracketed shots and which software you are using ?

that fourth one with the lightning is excellent really like that one

Palms

[Baddog]

The lightning one made the local newspaper here a few weeks back. I kept doing 30 sec exposures until I got some lightning..this was the "0" metered shot, so I then did -2 to go with it.

Software is just the older photomatix Ver2. I purchased it sometime ago now and have only recently got into the HDR thing, so the shots on my website are all from the last few months. I haven't bothered upgrading photomatix to Ver3.

At first I was shooting 3 shots (-2, 0, +2), in Aperture priority to keep DOF constant, but here's the problem;

A lot of the time I dont have my tripod with me so when shooting the 3 shots hand-held (multishot mode)...the first metered shot is fine, the second is fine too as its a quicker shutter speed, but the third +2 is a lot slower to get that overexposure. It was this 3rd shot that was causing me ghosting problems as I'd move slightly between exposures. I really should've used the tripod.

Anyway, after a bit of experimenting I found that 3rd +2 shot wasnt really contributing much to the overall HDR anyway...in fact I could barely tell the difference between shots that used (-2,0,+2) and another using the (-2,0) only. So now I only use 2 shots (-2, 0) as this is producing much sharper results with just as much detail - and can be done hand-held.

I only shoot RAW and photomatix can directly use RAW to produce higher quality HDR's than using jpg's.

The final HDR's once tone-mapped still need some photoshop work, such as;
Curves adjustment layer; give a nice s-contrast curve and change blend mode to luminosity.
noise-reduction (autoprofiled noise-ninja),
unsharp mask 20%, 60 pixels, 0 threshold
Then give it a hue/sat adjustment layer, colourize, hue to 33. This makes it go sepia, change blend mode of this adjustment layer to "Hue" and reduce opacity of the layer to 50%...this will give it the dirty industrial look.

Thats about it.

All the best guys and I look forward to seeing everyone's HDR's on this forum.

[palms]

Thank you Steve for your workflow very interesting and more heartning for someone with my ability, will be trying it out soon although i don't have photomatix, I have dynaimc photo

Palms