F8&Bthere
07-13-2009, 06:31 PM
Okay, it seems that slagging "overdone" HDR is almost as cool these days for the photo purists as resisting post processing completely or, even better, still shooting only film.
But of course what is considered to be overdone varies from one eye to the next.
So, I'm driving along a rural highway at sunset yesterday evening and I see a nice view of an orangey sunset through some light streaky clouds with an old farm house in the foreground and I stop, set up my camera to shoot 5 bracketed exposures, and with my cranky little girl reminding me it's past bed time I'm back in the car driving home.
At home I load the photos into Lightroom and like what I see, but none of the versions are what my eyes saw. Of the bracketed exposures, I like the underexposed one the best because it has the most colour in the sky but, not that I dislike it entirely, the farm house and foreground is completely in vignette. While my eyes saw the vivid sky and some detail in the backlit farm house. So I load the 5 shots into Photomatix to see what I can come up with.
Below is my original underexposed (-2) shot that I liked best if I was against post processing altogether. Then we have my Photomatix result that used mostly mild settings, I think this one would mostly be accepted as the bearable use of HDR processing but borderline. Then one with a little stronger settings, this is the point at which most purists would say it's overdone and cartoony looking.
Which do I like? Well I like the punchiest one to be honest, but its apparently so uncool that I think maybe it's just a fad for me that I'll regret later (Seeing my old HDR posts will be like looking at all my plaid shirts in my closet). I've always been a few steps behind the cool crowd.
But I really think that what my eyes saw, whether my brain is remembering it correctly or not, was somewhere between the two HDR results- closer the shot #2 obviously and not as saturated as the 3rd shot, But is it really that obnoxious?
But of course what is considered to be overdone varies from one eye to the next.
So, I'm driving along a rural highway at sunset yesterday evening and I see a nice view of an orangey sunset through some light streaky clouds with an old farm house in the foreground and I stop, set up my camera to shoot 5 bracketed exposures, and with my cranky little girl reminding me it's past bed time I'm back in the car driving home.
At home I load the photos into Lightroom and like what I see, but none of the versions are what my eyes saw. Of the bracketed exposures, I like the underexposed one the best because it has the most colour in the sky but, not that I dislike it entirely, the farm house and foreground is completely in vignette. While my eyes saw the vivid sky and some detail in the backlit farm house. So I load the 5 shots into Photomatix to see what I can come up with.
Below is my original underexposed (-2) shot that I liked best if I was against post processing altogether. Then we have my Photomatix result that used mostly mild settings, I think this one would mostly be accepted as the bearable use of HDR processing but borderline. Then one with a little stronger settings, this is the point at which most purists would say it's overdone and cartoony looking.
Which do I like? Well I like the punchiest one to be honest, but its apparently so uncool that I think maybe it's just a fad for me that I'll regret later (Seeing my old HDR posts will be like looking at all my plaid shirts in my closet). I've always been a few steps behind the cool crowd.
But I really think that what my eyes saw, whether my brain is remembering it correctly or not, was somewhere between the two HDR results- closer the shot #2 obviously and not as saturated as the 3rd shot, But is it really that obnoxious?