One Day, One Picture

When you are shooting a room with a great view, it is a good idea to show that view, if you can. But that is more complicated when you think about the exposure levels outside versus inside the room. Since I was in an awesome location recently (the Park Hyatt in Beaver Creek, Colorado), I decided to use the property to do some practice on. I have posted a few images from this test in the Photography For Real Estate Flickr group (yes, it is a Flickr complement to Larry Lohrman’s excellent site/ blog) and have received some useful feedback from it.

One thing I wanted to make sure to test was blending exposures to get a useful image of the room and the view outside the balcony doors. The image you see above is the third sample of three tests I did. Before talking about each one, I should let you know that the test does have a fundamental flaw. I took these photos before I really knew which program I was going to use to process them. And then I ignored some of the fundamentals of HDRI that I should have remembered from that book review I wrote way back when. So as I was installing HDRsoft’s Photomatix today, I came across their excellent procedure for “Taking differently exposed images“. I plan to use this procedure for my next batch of test images.

That said, my test images are a sequence of 5 photos, taken at -2EV, -1EV, 0EV, +1EV and +2EV. Pretty sure I had set them in shutter priority mode and not in manual mode, as the procedure above suggests. I did use a tripod, but I did not use the Remote Shutter Release. Even though my Olympus E-510 has Image Stabilization, I may have introduced enough bounce by pushing the shutter with my finger that some alignment errors exist. As I said, the test set has inherent flaws.

OK, now on to the resulting images, and how I got them.

Example 1.

This was my first compilation, and I achieved it using Photomatix 3.1Beta as a standalone program, importing the RAW images. I chose the Exposure Blending mode. Within that mode, I tried each of the configurations and determined that using 2 images to determine the various exposure levels resulted in the best image. Definitely not a very pleasing image though, and certainly not good enough to use in marketing materials.

Example 2.

Example 2 was done using the new Lightroom Export Plugin HDRsoft recently released in conjunction with the v3.1 beta program. Instead of Exposure Blending, I opted to Generate HDR, then applied Tone Mapping. Alignment was based on correcting shifts. I tweaked the various settings until I got a close approximation of what I saw when I walked into the room. When I zoom into the details though, I can tell that the alignment is off by enough of a variance to make edges look soft. Not quite what I was hoping for either.

Example 3.

While smaller versions of this image look almost comical, like many HDR images do, when this image comes up to a decent size, it does in fact resemble what I saw when I walked in the room. This one was also generated via the Lightroom Export Plugin, and also involved going the Generate HDR | Tone Mapping route. Alignment was via object matching, and light smoothing was set to medium (the middle radio button). This is a pretty close approximation, at least in my eyes.

Doing this exercise brought to light a few things:

1. I need to follow the directions
2. I need to use the remote shutter release
3. I need to continue using my tripod
4. I need to clean my lens and the UV filter on it
5. I need to play with Photomatix more - this is going to be tough (insert sarcasm here)

The bottom line is that Photomatix is a hugely valuable tool if you need to combine exposures or want to do interesting, artful imagery incorporating High Dynamic Range Imagery. Pricing is very reasonable by today’s software standards, and trial versions are available. See www.hdrsoft.com for more information.

Additionally, if you prefer learning from books, Amazon has an extensive selection of HDRI books that mention Photomatix and also include mentions of similar software tools.

I personally like having Lightroom be the center of my workflow now, and the latest version of Photomatix fits into that perfectly. Stay tuned for my next batch of test images.

Tags: 510, beaver, blend, book, clean, colorado, creek, digital, dyunamic, e-510, e510, estate, exposure, filter, generate, HDR, HDRI, high, hyatt, image, imagery, lens, lightroom, mapping, Olympus, park, photo, photography, photomatix, plugin, range, RAW, real, release, remote, shutter, TIFF, tone, tripod, uv, workflow

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 11th, 2008 at 7:00 am and is filed under Book Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.