Kitchen 1 of 3

Viewfinder from Bradenton, United States

A nice domestic capture and rustic feel.

4 Aug 2007 9:48am

Evi from Athens, Greece

It's beautiful and warm!

4 Aug 2007 2:38pm

Laurie from New Jersey, United States

I like the quaintness of the scene. It's very inviting.

I think the HDR process caused some undesired aberrations. I don't do HDR shots so I cannot tell you what happened. It looks like you used multiple exposures but they didn't line up well likely due to some movement of the camera. Using bracketing a tripod and cable release would probably solve that. When you bracket make sure to change the shutter speed not the aperture.

I do know that with Photomatix HDR you don't need multiple exposures to make HDR photos but to me the resulting images are often cartoonish and lack the depth that shadows add to a photo. I am not a huge fan of HDR in general.

4 Aug 2007 3:25pm

Twelvebit from Victoria, United States

I would probably make a poor editor as I often have difficulty deciding which shot of a series I like best. In this series I think I like this one the best. You're probably right about the cause of the ghosting being due to changing apertures and you're right to only adjust shutter speed. Did you try telling Photomatix to eliminate ghosting? When bracketing I set my camera to aperture priority mode and let the camera determine the shutter speed via the bracketing program --at least for most shots. Far more often though, I create different versions of a single shot.

You have total control of what you get with hdr. If an hdr image looks "cartoonish" it's because that's the way the person using the process created it. On the other hand, if you like that look, then that's a good thing anyway. You can simply use hdr to reinterpret the dynamic range so that there is detail in highlights and shadows with no overt signs of hdr processing; or you can push the process to the point where it calls attention to itself.

I don't think you got the most out of the process in this photo. This may be because the highlights were clipped in all the images you used, or it may be due to the processing choices you made in Photomatix. If you use three images you should have one with good highlight detail and one with good shadow detail. And there is no inherent reason for an hdr image to lack depth in the shadows --if it does, it is a processing choice, not an unintended result of the process.

Another important factor is how the images are shot. You can get good results from jpg images, but you have far more control and get lots better results from raw files. I think this is especially true when it comes to clipped highlights. The standard advice is to bias raw files to underexposure. I shoot raw with -1 stop of exposure adjustment. I also set my camera to show the image histogram and make adjustments to eliminate clipping at either end. However, the standard advice for jpg seems to be to expose for the highlights. A digital sensor loses all detail with overexposure, so if your camera doesn't give you some indication of when you're blowing out the highlights, you are at risk of clipping. In my experience with hdr, the sort of "grayed" highlights I see through the window of this image are a product of clipping. Also, you should be able to see detail in the rug where the window light is falling --that there is no detail in the rug also suggests clipping to me.

15 Aug 2007 10:25am

Twelvebit from Victoria, United States

Wow, I've rambled on, but one more thing. It's a matter of taste, and you generally have to shoot with this in mind, but you can use Photoshop to correct perspective distortion like you see in the buffet in this shot --make the verticals vertical. To do this and keep what you want in the image you generally have to leave lots of room because when you pull the verticals up straight you're going to lose part of the image --too much in this case.

15 Aug 2007 10:31am

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