Urban HDR sunset, help me on this traffic problem

[Brian Sayle]

Anyone help me on this, i tried to get this shot on Monday but it didn't work at all. The road below is too dark to get along with any kind of sky, said to myself come back tomorrow with ND grad filters and it might work out but still no joy, so i did a HDR of it.

This is what i cant work out, I've not done HDR for ages, not really my thing, fiddled about loads with the cars on the road but just cant seen to get it to work with traffic in, so i cloned them all out and went for a empty road

The bottom shot crop is all i seem to be able to get with cars in, tried just having cars in one shot but no good, anyone got any ideas on how i may be able to do it with the traffic in ? i did think maybe just clone them from a jpeg but it looks silly having none HDR cars


Kingsway Tunnel by 4737 carlin, on Flickr

 

[swanseamale47]

The bottom half will lighten up quite easily in photoshop, just duplicate the layer, lighten it with levels or curves and mask out the sky part with a layer mask.

 

[stupar]

What Wayne said.

You have nice solid lines splitting the foreground from the sunset so selecting and masking should be fairly easy!

 

[Brian Sayle]

Right cheers guys, i need to learn this masking tool and take advantage of it!

 

[ericmark]

What I have done is use layers, masks and apply to combine rather than HDR software. This then allows some manual intervention and using the brush tool you can select which of the images to include cars.

I have tried CS4 and Picturenaut and the problem is both tone map the whole image so it looks wishy washy. I know Photomatrix has local tone mapping but can't afford that. So I tried the layers, masks and apply in the first place to get some local tone mapping.

With multi-images it's a bit of a fiddle and not too pleased but with just 2 images it seems to work very well. I have sometimes used two of same image one with opacity reduced either side of the other one.

I load into layers using bridge. Apply is on image tag and there are many options multiply is normal one I use. Because I load with bridge there is no problem but if not loaded with bridge you need to make layer from back-ground image.