HDR with large format

[Robert Hughes]

I was in a coffeeshop this morning, where all along one wall, some photographer was displaying a series of prints bearing all the symptoms of digital excess: HDR and stitching to ridiculous extremes. I hated them, and made my opinion known to my group (wife, daughter & stepson). They all thought the pictures were nice, bright and colorful - of course my daughter added, "compared to yours, which are all gray and muddy!"

Snap! Oh, well, no accounting for the tastes of teenagers.

[D. Bryant]

Using HDRI imaging techniques of exposure and HDRI software can yield very excellent results producing natural looking scenes. One can do with sheet film, roll film or digital cameras. Modern HDR software packages will align the images to eliminate image alignment problems any many ghosting problems and tome mapping halos.

HDRI imaging has evolved a long way in the past couple of years. Photoshop CS5 has a very good HDR engine and NIK HDR Efex Pro is also quite excellent. Photmatix 4.0 has improved features as well.

[QT Luong]

I don't see registration as problematic if you use "Auto-Align Layers" which debuted in Photoshop CS3.

I was in a coffeeshop this morning, where all along one wall, some photographer was displaying a series of prints bearing all the symptoms of digital excess: HDR and stitching to ridiculous extremes. I hated them, and made my opinion known to my group (wife, daughter & stepson). They all thought the pictures were nice, bright and colorful - of course my daughter added, "compared to yours, which are all gray and muddy!"

Snap! Oh, well, no accounting for the tastes of teenagers.

HDR techniques, when used "tastefully" can produce very believable images - although I still prefer manual blending - however I have the impression that what you and me find excessive is the very reason why HDR is so liked (Trey Ratcliff is the most popular photographer on the internet): because it gives the license to create highly saturated images beyond reality.

[Matus Kalisky]

Some interesting read. I have myself tried HDR in 4x5" once (2 exposures 1 stop apart, HDR with CS3) - the contrast of the scene was too large and I really wanted to get the shot (to save a bit of the detail in the window). I was using E100G (color neg would have handled the scene in one shot).

Looks like this:

(follow the link if you want to see ~10 Mpix size)