probably the best HDR on flickr

hawken

stumbled on this guys flickr, very, very nice.



tonnes more in his flickr stream:
http://flickr.com/photos/stevacek/

like

this

for

example:



!!

pior

The first one looks SOOO flat! I like that parking lot pic tho.

Funny how overdone HDR makes real life photography look CG. Yuck!

poopinmymouth

Pior is just an HDR pooper, must be the french. I for one think they both look AWESOME. There are plenty of photographs with lots of depth, this is something new and has it's own awesomeness. VIVA LA HDR!

Tumerboy

nice. I need to figure out how to take some HDR :P

Emil Mujanovic

At first glance, I actually thought both were CG.
The second one looks pretty rad. Looks a little like a UT/Gears level or something.

-caseyjones

3D-j

anyone tried taking any HDR textures?

Tumerboy

3D-J I tried a while back with little success, but this may spur me to try my hand at it again. I'll post up here if I actually come out with anything decent.

Eric Chadwick

They always look crappy to me, I've seen only a few HDR pics that I like, most of them are like these... so impressionistic, soft. They also remind me of badly-done coloring of black/white photos.

I guess it's just the Photoshopper in me that sees these soft masks and thinks "lazy." But then again I guess they're meant to be more like paintings.

poopinmymouth

HDR texture, taken today!


I agree that most people up the contrast in HDR too much and it can ruin the effect. I think I've taken a few that have the extra "oomph" that comes from HDR, without all the depth taken out. All of these are HDR
http://www.poopinmymouth.com/net/pics/panoramics/germany_02.jpg
http://www.poopinmymouth.com/net/pics/panoramics/switzerland_09.jpg
http://www.poopinmymouth.com/net/pics/panoramics/los_angeles_sidewalk4.jpg
http://www.poopinmymouth.com/net/pics/panoramics/parking_lot02.jpg

Also for those of you who don't know I keep a running Pano page from my travels, here ya go! http://www.poopinmymouth.com/net/pics/panoramics/panoramics.html

Eric Chadwick

Oooh, I like, especially switzerland_03.

Tumerboy

The last one is pushed the furthest, and even then, it's still pretty wussy by comparison to most of the stuff I see. I found that both the HDR process and especially the tonemapping was really accentuating any grain & noise in the dark areas, to the point where, even if the rest of the photo looked decent, the grain in one corner would ruin it. I could have just gone in and blended some of that out or whatever. . . but I'm lazy.

MoP

I hate those blurry things on the first page of that guy's pics, IMHO they look terrible. He has some really nice photography from a few pages in though, good env. art reference too. Flickr is one of my favourite places to get reference from now.

Tumerboy

[ QUOTE ]
Flickr is one of my favourite places to get reference from now.

[/ QUOTE ]

Ditto.

hawken

yeah it's miles better than google image search

Tumerboy

Alright, here's the results from today's run around. Nothing terribly impressive, but better than my previous results.

If anyone wants, I can post up the original images for comparison.

hawken

they don't really scream 30 second exposures of 3 different images mashed together.

looks a bit like dodge and burn to me

Tumerboy

Well, I wasn't anywhere dark enough to warrant 30 second exposures. But I did take different exposures of each scene and mash em together. When I tried to push the tone mapping further it just looked like ass. . .

Anyway, here's the ones I was working from (scaled significantly)

Tumerboy

And here's a more "HDRy" version using the same source images:

Joshua Stubbles

I'm not fond of the overly-done "artsy" HDR images. Those two on top, for example. Lots of detail, but not my 'thang. Poop - that rock is drop-dead sexy, though.
I bought a new Cybershot DSC-H2 the other day, and went to town. I've been using Photomatix Pro for my HDR assembly and tone mapping adjustments. With hardly any tweaking, I was able to get some really impressive results. Even though my kitchen makes shitty subject matter, the results are still impressive:



The middle image on the left is what a normal camera would get. Washed out tones, and mild over exposure. The HDR/Tone mapped image really brings out the details. You can actually see outside, which is awesome. The color could use some tweaking, but as a quick example with pretty much default settings, not bad.

Justin Meisse

HDR is supposed to be closer to what you see with your own eyes, right?

Joshua Stubbles

Realtime HDR does, yes. Like when you walk from a dark room into a bright courtyard. It takes time for your eyes to adjust, so everything is overblown with light.

These static ones don't quite use the same principle. While they do show what your eye is capable of seeing, not even a human eye can discern all of these tonal values at the same time.
Using HDR/Tone mapping on these static images actually violates the tonal ability of our cameras, and indeed our own eyes. It displays the full range of tones into a single image, something which is impossible for us to do.

Tumerboy

but you can still come a lot closer to what the human eye can see (if you don't go overboard) than just a single image from a camera, which usually has a strong bias to a certain range of tonalities. The human eye has a much larger range, so by taking multiple images at different exposures and combining them in this way, you can come close to what you'd actually see.

Joshua Stubbles

Although you can't get quite as much detail as with HDR, plain old tonal mapping & tweaking gets some great results as well.
I took these 2 in San Francisco last weekend. They were done with a regular point-and-shoot FujiFilm A340.