Châteaux de Lastours

Tal — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 10:45:59 +0000

The following photographs are some basic experiments I did with HDR tonemapping vs traditional masking techniques in Photoshop. The view from atop the Châteaux de Lastours, brightly lit, had obviously a very high dynamic range in terms of light energy. I have tried capturing it using two methods. The first one simply involved shooting two exposures, one for the highlights and another one for the shadows. They were then layered in Photoshop and masked with a simple linear gradient (similiar to what a gradient-density filter would have done had I had one in my bag). The second method consisted of shooting seven auto-bracketed exposures, 1 EV apart, combining them into an HDR image and then tone-mapping that in Photomatix. Since the composition is basically horizontal, the results were very similar. All images were shot RAW on a Nikon D200 and developed in Lightroom.

The following image is the result of layering two exposures in Photoshop:

This is the image resulting from tone-mapping a seven-exposure HDR file:

The main difference between the two is obviously the horizon, which has much more detail in the tonemapped image. Blowing out the horizon highlights in the layered version was a necessary compromise in order to avoid darkening the top of the tower too much. But apart from that both methods achieved similar outputs. Tonemapping would win hands-down, though, in a more complex composition.

On a final note, the same subject from a different viewpoint later in the day, using with a single exposure and no Photoshop editing. Just to point out that sometimes simplicity can also be a valid solution.

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Châteaux de Lastours