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Another to be or not with HDR
- Thread starter WetSparks
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mfwild13
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It certainly seems to have recovered this shot
You can do HDR in CS2 if you have bracketed and have three images the same'ish.
You can also do some of it manually - see tutorials for help on blending and I'm sure Bachs did a nice one on recovering shadow detail but cant seem to find it.
I think its the "Blending Raw Files" tutorial:
http://www.steve-perks.com/gfx/forumposts/mergeraw/mergeraw.html
http://www.steve-perks.com/gfx/forumposts/mergeraw/mergeraw.html
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I think everyone should know how to use HDR. It's a great tool but needs to be used with restraint. You've slightly underexposed your original chopper shot, but the real problem is that you're shooting the chopper sideways on against a bright sky so it's going to look a little dull by comparison. Also without that side of the chopper being in full sun there's no way you'd expect to see the people inside the body of the chopper that clearly, as they're in heavy shadow. Try just raising the gamma or adjusting the levels on your original shot, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with the results. 
You'd expect to see the brighter parts of the occupants - faces etc, but not every detail, which is why the HDR versions tend to look a bit unreal.
You might lose a little of the intense blue sky, but if you really want to, you can recover it by selecting the background with the magic wand, feather the mask by around 12-16 pixels and then increase the saturation and or drop the gamma a little.
You'd expect to see the brighter parts of the occupants - faces etc, but not every detail, which is why the HDR versions tend to look a bit unreal.
You might lose a little of the intense blue sky, but if you really want to, you can recover it by selecting the background with the magic wand, feather the mask by around 12-16 pixels and then increase the saturation and or drop the gamma a little.
chuckles
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I tend to try and be a realist in these situations. What would you see with the naked eye? Certainly nowhere near as much as you've recorded in the very first image. Too much would be in silhouette and yet we accept this because that's just how life is.
Could you improve on the MkI eyeball? In a way, yes - but only by shielding your eyes from the strong light surrounding the chopper. What would that give? Overexposed (blinding) sky, with no detail in the highlights but the opportunity to see the shadow detail will be there. Why does it work in real life? Because the brain sorts out what it wants to try and see, excludes or ignores what it doesn't want to record.
The photographic record can't perform this trick of selection so we see through this imagery everything or nothing. So, at best, what we have is a compromise between highlights and shadows. And that has been the case since Fox Talbot recorded that window at Lacock Abbey!
HDR can be good in some cases, but certainly not all. Too much looks unnatural .... IMHO
Could you improve on the MkI eyeball? In a way, yes - but only by shielding your eyes from the strong light surrounding the chopper. What would that give? Overexposed (blinding) sky, with no detail in the highlights but the opportunity to see the shadow detail will be there. Why does it work in real life? Because the brain sorts out what it wants to try and see, excludes or ignores what it doesn't want to record.
The photographic record can't perform this trick of selection so we see through this imagery everything or nothing. So, at best, what we have is a compromise between highlights and shadows. And that has been the case since Fox Talbot recorded that window at Lacock Abbey!
HDR can be good in some cases, but certainly not all. Too much looks unnatural .... IMHO