/dev/random

I have been using Hydra’s aperture plugin to create HDR images from 3 bracketed photos. It’s pretty basic but produces fairly good results without a lot of tweaking. Now HDR Software’s Photomatix is also available as an Aperture plugin. It offers many more options than Hydra, but takes a bit of tweaking to produce a [...]

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This afternoon the sky looked like it came straight from “The Simpsons”, so I was inspired to take a few shots of the clouds. I decided to do exposure bracketing and use HDR processing so I could enter them in Hydra’s HDR contest.

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I took a few shots of tonight’s very spectacular sunset using the D90’s exposure bracketing and created an HDR image from them. I tried both the Hydra plugin for Aperture 2.1 and Photoshop with the Photomatix tone mapping plugin. I found that Photomatix produces a much more vivid image with more detail.

Hydra Plugin
Photoshop + Photomatix [...]

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The D90’s exposure bracketing feature is great for HDR imaging. When you turn on bracketing, 2 or 3 consecutive shots will automatically use different exposures. If you use continuous mode, simply press and hold the shutter release to take the 2 or 3 bracketed shots. The resulting shots are exactly what you need to merge [...]

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When I was walking home from the gym this evening, the sunset was really spectacular, so I rushed home to get my camera and take a few shots. Since time was running out, I didn’t bother taking the tripod. Here’s a 3 exposure HDR made without a tripod, using Photoshop’s Merge to HDR & Photomatix [...]

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Creaceed has released a new version of Hydra, which includes a new HDR plugin for Aperture 2.1.
It doesn’t offer as many options as Photomatix, but the results are very nice. These were created with the same source images I had previously processed with Photoshop and the Photomatix plugin. The results look very natural, although it [...]

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I’ve been trying out more HDR processing using the Photomatix tone mapping plugin in Photoshop.
Here’s one I took tonight, using 5 exposures at -2.0, -1.0, 0, +1.0, and +2.0EV.

Here’s one I took a few days ago, using only 3 exposures at -2.0, 0, and +2.0EV.

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Here’s an HDR image I created from three raw images. I imported them into Photoshop, used the ‘Merge to HDR’ automation, and adjusted the color, luminance & contrast with the Photomatix tone mapping plugin. The flowers moved slightly between the shots, resulting in some ghosting around the edges.

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