austinshackles

In the HDR version the foreground looks about how it actually looked at the time.  Not sure which picture I prefer, to be honest.  They both have merits.

Mist from this morning was still there this afternoon, more or less the same shot with different lighting.  This is a touch under exposed on the foreground.

Not sure the power company would approve of making their lines wiggly.  That said, for a phone, it's surprisingly competent at this trick.  If I could afford it, I'd be quite tempted by the Samsung NX (?) which combines interchangeable lenses and a decent sized sensor with the android system and, one would hope, trick modes like the phones have.

The on-board HDR has not really achieved much here.  The tones are slightly flatter without gaining significant detail and the loss of the deeper shadows hasn't made a better picture of it, so I prefer the standard shot in the other image.  We learn by trying things and deciding whether it's worth the effort - in this case, not convinced it was.  It might be that by taking separate exposures and doing the HDR manually, better results could have been achieved, but the phone camera app doesn't have bracketed exposure as an option.  

The phone's built-in HDR mode has coped admirably with eliminating the glare and bringing out the detail in the mist in the distance.  The foreground is more the right general tone but looks a little over-processed, although that's not uncommon with HDR images.  Somehow the whole thing looks a little lacking in sharpness, which may be down to camera shake - it's harder to hold the phone steady than a real camera...

Reading in AP there are quite a few photographers using smartphones in place of cameras: in my case, the phone is always with me, on this day the camera was at home.  This is not a bad image but some of the detail is lost in the glare from the early morning sun, just out of shot to the left - including a focal point, which is the mist flowing over the distant hills.  Commendably little flare from the lens on what is hardly a high quality optical setup, though.  The foreground is also a bit dark - where I was standing there's no mist.

The same time and place (well, about a minuter later), this image is composed from 6 vertical frames altogether - 3 pairs, exposed by the camera using auto (AV) mode, and at 1-and-2-thirds EV under.  When doing HDR stuff I normally take a bracket of 3, using normal, +1.2/3 and -1.2/3 EV.  In this case I didn't use the "over" frame from each set, as it didn't seem needed to get the answer I was looking for.  I did in fact take another set to the right of this picture, but I didn't feel they contributed much so left them out of this.

Processing:

1) create and tonemap 3 HDR images from 3 pairs.  The settings were chosen to come as close as I could get to what I saw at the time, judging from memory.  Certainly, the sky was at least that coloured!

2) Adjust the left and right images using Gimp to get the colour balance as close as I could to the middle one.  The left image especially had more blue/green and less red.  The right image mostly had a bit more green.

3) stitch the images created into a panorama.  The result is not too far from what I recall of the scene at the time, certainly a more faithful reproduction than the plain as-shot one.

The panorama image could of course be trimmed, to remove the black borders, but it's interesting to note what adjustments autostitch made to get them to fit together.

All the images were shot using Canon 18-55mm lens, set at 18, which equates to around 28mm on a 35mm camera.

 

Panorama from 5 vertical format frames.  Processed only to convert to jpeg from canon raw and stitched together by the useful autostitch.  

As I rather expected, the image doesn't really capture the full range of colour and light that was present.  See the other image for more...

 

Beautifully sharp macro, well done!

This is reduced to 1200x800 and converted to Jpeg using Canon software.  The orange in the sky is light pollution from south wales, and the bright "star" is Jupiter.   Took a few attempts to get it right but I'm quite pleased with this.

And the "over-exposed" image - the bridge and the shadow underneath, and the brick-and-stone pillar, all look more or less right but the background and sky are badly washed-out. I daresay there is data there, if you played with brightness and contrast, but that would lose the detail in the foreground into shadow.

This is the "underexposed" shot, -1.2/3 EV from the previous "standard" image. The exposure looks about right for the bright sunlight on the hill and the sky.

For this one I've uploaded all 3 original images. This is the standard image using the camera's AE - this image quite clearly shows the limits of the dynamic range of the sensor.

Looking at this one again, I see an alignment issue in the twigs on the tree to the right. I'm not sure how that happened, possibly a breeze moved them between shots. The process of firing the 3 shots takes less than a second, if using fairly high ISO to keep the shutter speeds up.

 

I did notice that at one point the camera had got into shutter-priority mode, which meant that it was varying the aperture. I suspect this is not desirable for taking these sets of images, I normally been using use aperture-priority and F8, and about ISO400 unless it's very bright.

 

Since the larger parts of the tree and the fence look OK, I think I favour the breeze theory. Just something else to look out for...

Tall trees and converging verticals. The main effect here is to reduce the effect of the bright sky behind them, getting a bit more detail.

Here I wanted to retain the effect of looking from the shade into the light, while not losing all the foreground into the gloom. I'm reasonably pleased with how it came out.

Here again, most difference shows in the twigs which are backlit by the sky. Also the sky colour is more like it should be.

Much better detail in the foreground trees silhouetted against the sky. To get this without HDR would have the foreground quite under-exposed. That might also be a nice shot, but it's not what I'm trying to do here.

 

As mentioned, where there's a big range of lighting the HDR technique does more. In this case, to get the bridge details the brightly lit background and sky were washed out. It's a pity about the roadsign, but there isn't any way to crop it without losing part of the bridge.

 

The previous 3 images are the source for this. I notice that the sky is a touch darker in the final result, here, than in the "dark" image of the set - so the image could have been a bit lighter - it's not taking a lot from the "bright" image. However, I quite like the more-dramatic lighting in this one.

Fairly subtle effect this time - there's not much difference from the standard exposure. However, check the tree in the top left, and see how much detail has been gained in the branches.

Only used the normal and under exposures for this one, aiming for a dramatic bit of backlighting without losing all the detail, and cropped to remove modern scenery. It came out quite good, I think.

This one is better. The shot is quite early in the morning, so the lighting isn't so intense and a bit misty. The HDR technique I feel has more relevance the wider the range of lighting in the original shot. In this case, there's very limited scope to improve the original - I aimed to get a touch more detail in the distance and slightly less silhouette effect on the branches in the foreground, and I'm quite pleased with the results.

To be honest, I prefer the original of this shot. However, this serves as a useful demonstration of how easy it is to do too much to an image in post-processing! The image is really too bright and saturated.

 

I think this one has been processed a tad too much. I may revist it, or I may simply abandon it. It looks to me that the colours are a bit too intense, which is a setting in the tonemapping options. As you can see by comparison with the previous image (original) I've also cropped it a bit.

This and the next one were done using Photomatix's details enhancer mode, rather than exposure fusion, Exposure fusion didn't seem to work well on these sets, probably because the lighting is less extreme than some - I was hoping for some patches of sunlight on this view, but they weren't happening. The tone-mapping process is capable of producing much more surreal answers, and you have to be careful in trying to preserve a more or less realistic view. This doesn't look far off from what I recall with the naked eye.