affinity photo HDR pictures

[Ash Eldritch]

@Bololoco I have an UHD monitor so was going to check but then see you've had lots of better informed people reply anyway. 

I am absolutely no photography expert but one things stands out to me and I'm not sure if this is deliberate, part of the process, or what, but just looking at the very first image it's as if it's corrupted or a jigsaw that's been misaligned? The most obvious examples splits are in the gate and fence and grass. The right door is split in the middle, the far left door also. The roof is segmented in various places either side of the attic window. Even the foremost corner of the building splits to the right of the hanging basket. There are others too but perhaps not so obvious.

This is not a critique, more pointing out something that you're perhaps already aware but if not...

[PaulEC]

1 hour ago, Ash Eldritch said:

the very first image it's as if it's corrupted or a jigsaw that's been misaligned?

This is a problem when trying to stack or stitch images that don't quite line up, it tends to be worse when using wide angle lenses. Using a tripod would help to solve the problem, but very few people use tripods nowadays! Of course you can also get problems if anything moves between taking the individual shots! The only solution is to retouch the stacked/stitched photo, preferably before applying any effects, tone mapping etc.

As someone who could definitely be described as "elderly" I must say that I do like these images. Although I don't think that this style/effect suits all subjects, these pictures work well. I particularly like the one with the carved tree.

[Ash Eldritch]

@PaulEC Ah right, Thank you. Now I know. Thinking about it after I realised it looked similar to the effect on google earth's street view.

[Bololoco]

3 hours ago, Ash Eldritch said:

@Bololoco I have an UHD monitor so was going to check but then see you've had lots of better informed people reply anyway. 

I am absolutely no photography expert but one things stands out to me and I'm not sure if this is deliberate, part of the process, or what, but just looking at the very first image it's as if it's corrupted or a jigsaw that's been misaligned? The most obvious examples splits are in the gate and fence and grass. The right door is split in the middle, the far left door also. The roof is segmented in various places either side of the attic window. Even the foremost corner of the building splits to the right of the hanging basket. There are others too but perhaps not so obvious.

This is not a critique, more pointing out something that you're perhaps already aware but if not...

You're absolutely right. There was a lot more to making this image than meets the eye. It's a panorama using a wide angle lens, consisting of approx 15 images, each image is a HDR merge of about 15 images, making it a composition of about 200 images in total and it was shot hand held, so I definitely had parallax issues when it was stitch together.

A tripod would have helped a little bit but I should really invest in a proper multi row panoramic gimbal to reduce/eliminate parallax.

The only issue there is that whilst I do most (if not all) of my photography whilst walking the dog, carrying around all this extra equipment is just way too cumbersome, especially if I have to set it up and pack it down again for each shot.

The real answer is to do my more complex panoramas whilst out driving, so I can have it set up in the back of my van and just lift it out and back in again as and when necessary.

It does spoil the finished picture, so i'll need to get that sorted at some point as I wouldn't mind selling some of my photos...alternatively, I could get a bigger sensor camera with more pixels and as wide an angle lens as possible and take it all in one shot.

[Bololoco]

2 hours ago, PaulEC said:

This is a problem when trying to stack or stitch images that don't quite line up, it tends to be worse when using wide angle lenses. Using a tripod would help to solve the problem, but very few people use tripods nowadays! Of course you can also get problems if anything moves between taking the individual shots! The only solution is to retouch the stacked/stitched photo, preferably before applying any effects, tone mapping etc.

As someone who could definitely be described as "elderly" I must say that I do like these images. Although I don't think that this style/effect suits all subjects, these pictures work well. I particularly like the one with the carved tree.

There is a way of reducing the effect of bad stitching using wide angle lenses....and that's to shoot more pics with much greater overlap...90% overlap sounds like a lot but it definitely helps. The overlap in this pic is about 80%

[cgidesign]

Regarding the sun halo. It seems, APhoto's hdr algorythms are limited if there are strong lightsources in a scene.

 

[Archangel]

The first and the fifth do not seem to benefit with HDR as much as the others. The third feels overly detailed but would be a very useful image demonstrate the effects of sensory overload to someone who doesn't normally suffer with it. I don't hate the third image but I would have to lie down after looking at it for a while.

And apart from the odd fence detail on the first image I think they look great. The last image doesn't scream HDR at all.

[Bololoco]

Thanks for the critiques everyone.

I think HDR is a great tool but as people have pointed out, it doesn't really work on everything, at least not to the extreme. I have done some HDR without additional tone mapping and the images are much more natural in appearance.

I've also been bypassing my camera's HDR sequence to manually adjust exposure, this way you can get even darker darks and whiter whites as well as increase or decrease the number of exposures to put through the HDR mangler and I think i've come up with a new method of faking infra-red photography in the process.

I've uploaded a pic so you can see what i'm coming up with using this new technique. I've sort of repeated it with other pics but have yet to nail it down, so I know what results i'm going to get before I do it....time will get me there. 

I should say though....this is not done through blend modes....it's nothing to do with that whatsoever, although you could probably take it even further that way.

[Bololoco]

On 8/3/2024 at 10:21 AM, cgidesign said:

Regarding the sun halo. It seems, APhoto's hdr algorythms are limited if there are strong lightsources in a scene.

 

Yeah i've had the sun halo appear quite a lot....and that's without any additional tone mapping.

I often sequence extreme exposures for my HDR's (32000th sec all the way up to 1 second - almost pure black to almost pure white) and this can really accentuate the halo effefct...I hope AFFPH/CANVA can do something about it...it's not always pretty!

[Guillermo Espertino]

I probably fall into the "elderly yelling at the cloud" bunch, and I have to admit that I don't like those kinds of images at all, but for the sake of the argument, let's say you are trying to experiment with methods for producing a non-photorealistic image that compresses high dynamic range within the displayable range of a regular screen, which is perfectly fine.

In that perfectly valid case, you need to address some problems to produce a good quality image: The first and more glaring one is channel clipping, posterization. It's challenging but you can try these ideas:

- Avoid processing your images in 8-bit precision and integers. Move to 32-bit floating point early in your process. This is, make sure your stacked exposures produce a true high dynamic range image where RGB values can go way above 1.0.
- Experiment with the 32-bit preview. Go find a good OCIO config so you can experiment with good transforms like AgX or even Blender Filmic. (try Joe Genco's "PixelManager", it's great).
- Mind the difference between data and display. Your "scene referred" image must stay HDR, try to play non-destructively with operations pre and post transform (in other words, put an OCIO colorspace adjustment layer, and experiment adjusting your image before and after that OCIO operation).

I'm pretty sure you can produce great images that way, avoiding the posterization and clipping problems you had in your samples. Stacking so many exposure steps should get rid of most of the noise and artifacts, so with a smooth, high-dynamic range original to start from, your result should have smooth and clean gradations.
 

Oh, and btw. It's not clear to me whether you stacked display-referred images (like jpegs) or 32 bit developed raw images. If you used the former, keep in mind that doing the latter should give you best results with much less exposure steps, as developed raw images are already sort of HDR (depending on how many steps of DR your camera has, of course).

EDIT: I just posted an example image of HDR editing doing the steps suggested above in the sun halo thread from the previous comment.

 

[Stef71]

I use HDR mostly with 3 images (-1, 0,+1) to get the most out of the lighting, It's very easy to go overboard with the effects you can create along the way and I think thats whats happened to your pictures. It's mostly personal taste of course but apart from the church all are too blue for my liking and in some of them the whites are overexposed leaving nothing (even white needs some detail) the halo is a result of cranking it up too much (NotMyFault gives the answer how to get rid of that)

Unlike walt.farrell I don't think the viewer needs to have have HDR-capable monitor, it only helps to get even more out of the view but the general view on regular monitors (and print) should give a nice view on HDR images. Viewers taste is another thing, some don't like  too mucht editing on any picture and if thats the case they will hate your pictures (but hey so what!) I do like them but I just think they could be better without the bleu glare