Comments on: Faking HDR in Gimp

By: Shotslot

Shotslot — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 06:39:57 +0000

The other thing I'd say about it is that different effects are accomplished if you you use the tone mapping or exposure blending methods in photomatix, blending produces a much more subtle effect, more like a best-choice pixel selection process…for more discussion I'm more than happy to link to some of my own ramblings
;-)

http://shotslot.blogspot.com/2010/01/high-dynam...

Jennifer, will happily do it for you if you like, but didn't want to snatch your shots right off your page and produce it ta-da!

By: Abhilash

Abhilash — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:16:22 +0000

@Shotslot

I have a rough comparison in this post between the use of the Advanced Tone Mapping plugin for GIMP, Photomatix and Qtpfsgui for Linux.

By: Abhilash

Abhilash — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:10:34 +0000

@Jafael
A short description of HDR would be this.
By combining images with different levels of exposure, you bring out as much of the shadow and highlight details in the image as you can. Unfortunately, the monitors cant properly display all the colours that do come out in this process. For this you have to "Tone Map" the resultant combined HDR (by using other software) which will map the colours in the image to those that can be shown on your screen.

The highly colourful images that you are talking about is usually people going overboard during the tone mapping. The process of creating a nice HDR can result in images that show you more detail than a normal image would. For example, the inside of a church, where there are lots of shadows and highlights together. or it can bring out a reflection that may not be readily visible in the normal image.

Hope this helps.

By: iffles

iffles — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:25:38 +0000

I'm afraid covering that would be far outside of my expertise or the point of this entry. Though, you're right, I probably should have included a link to a good explanation. If I find one, I'll post it.

By: iffles

iffles — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:24:28 +0000

Great tips, thanks!

By: iffles

iffles — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:23:54 +0000

That's a really good idea, to run them through Photomatrix. Of course, I'll probably never DO it for various reasons, but it IS a good idea :)

By: iffles

iffles — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:22:26 +0000

Thanks, I hadn't seen that one, I'll be sure to check it out!

By: Jafael

Jafael — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:24:18 +0000

What is HDR?!?

I googled it after reading this entry, because I really did not know, and I see that it means High Dynamic Range. Which is still not thoroughly helpful to me. Further reading reveals to me that it means something along the lines of super colorful, highly processed photos. So I got the answer I was looking for, but I thought maybe some other beginner like me wasn't so sure of what the heck you were talking about either, and might benefit from a little explanation.

By: Brandon

Brandon — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:45:47 +0000

It is a personal preference thing I guess. I liked the effect of your process. And it is something that is easy enough to do.

I really like HDR photos…for instance, I thought the pictures found at the link that Shotslot put up were great. To me they have a depth, and mood that makes them very interesting. I however do not think of them as “photographs”, but more as digital art that started with a digital photo base.

One tip to shorten your process…
You can right click your layers in the layer list and choose add new layer, then choose the “Grayscale copy of layer” option in the options window that opens. This would save a few steps. And for the layer mask that gets inverted, just right click that layer, choose “View Layer Mask”, Colors -> Invert, and finally, uncheck the show layer mask option.

By: Todd Eddy

Todd Eddy — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:50:12 +0000

Like you I'm not a big fan of HDR mainly because it's usually overdone. This would fit into the "crazy color pop" variant you mentioned. Saw on digital photography school an article on an hdr technique called exposure fusion. Click on the article for a longer explanation but basically it looks at all the images and determines the "best" pixel for each pixel of the image. Then applies some blending to smooth things out. The result is an image that looks more like what you probably saw when taking the picture. See here for links to guis and such. I used ImageFuser on the mac with all the default settings and came up with this picture (please copy that to your server as I tend to clean out my photobucket account on occasion). Notice that compared to the "properly exposed" image the sky shows up better as well as the alleyway. I've tried it a few times and it made the images to "flat" for me but I actually like what it did here.

I like Shotslot's idea of seeing what it does in photomatrix. Perhaps make a followup post with all the various comparison versions.