I’m rather interested in HDR photography. Photographer Scott Wyden started an “HDR Tennis” match, and I thought I’d try my hand at the sport. HDR Tennis begins with someone sharing a set of RAW or DNG bracketed photos and then giving other photographers a chance to bring them to life using their own combination of filters, tone-mapping and other image adjustments.
Scott served with “Boston Bad Brackets,” uses three DNG files captured on the streets of Boston. Scott “was handholding the camera when [he] took the photos. To top it off, there were moving people and vehicles in the scene,” so participants can expect to put the image alignment and deghosting tools to use when creating their HDR versions.
Vibe No. 1: The Red Pill
In my first attempt with the brackets, I used Aperture with the Photomatix plugin. I started with the black and white preset, and then further tone-mapped the scene. First, I bumped up the saturation in the highlights and shadows just a bit, which accentuated the street signs, traffic lights and lamps on the buildings. Then I boosted the microcontrast and tinkered with the white and black points and the gamma until I achieved a gritty contrast in the bricks, windows and pavement. After saving the tone-mapped image back to Aperture, I used the recovery slider to soften the glow from the lamps and traffic lights, and reduced the saturation in the greens, blues and yellows. I eased the color temperature, tint to the right pull more of an warm, yet ominous feel from the scene, and bumped the highlight slider about 25% to somewhat reduce the halo in the sky around the buildings. Here is the result:
Vibe No. 2: The Blue Pill
For my next take on the subject, I started with Photoshop’s “Merge to HDR” function. I’m currently stuck with Photoshop CS3, and I really dislike its handling of Merge to HDR. (I understand it’s been improved in CS5, but I can’t justify the upgrade at this point.) Anyway, after converting it from 32 to 16 bit using Localize Adaptation (Radius: 40, Threshold: 1), I saved it as a PSD, and opened it in Aperture. Again, using the Photomatix plugin, I moved some bits around and came up with the following version.
To me, this version is much more upbeat. The brighter sky, cleaner looking bricks, lower contrast and higher saturation provide the brain with a higher dose of the blue pill. A photo like this could almost be used to sell gentrified, mill-building condos.
Deghosting
As mentioned, there are two people walking along the sidewalk in the photos; this caused considerable ghosting of the figures when the three photos were merged into a single HDR image. The Photomatix plugin for Aperture does not, as of this writing, have the selective deghosting tool that the standalone version has. Photomatix Pro did a mediocre job of deghosting the walkers. And I don’t believe Merge to HDR in Photoshop (CS3) attempts to reduce ghosting, but if so, it did a terrible job with these images. I quickly tried removing one of the people from the shot with the Healing Brush tool in Photoshop. The results, while not perfect, would probably do as well as, if not better than, an automated solution.
Try it for yourself
If you’d like to create your own effect from this set of images, head over to Scott Wyden’s blog, download the DNG’s and pop them into your photo editor of choice. If you haven’t tried Photomatix yet, it’s available as a standalone application or as a plugin for Aperture or Photoshop as a trial version (watermark added to saved images). It’s loads of fun and there is a lot one can learn from going through the process.
