Weather was lovely last weekend so had a wander up the river and took a few snaps. Basically looking for some potential material for the fantasy landscape project. On one of the 'pub-stops' I bumped into a guy who offered me a copy of Photomatix Pro ( seem to be doing well with the freebies!) obviously it would have been churlish to refuse! Picked it up the other day and have had a brief play with it... hence the title 'I don't have a clue what I'm doing' There is a help file but help files are usually rubbish so I don't tend to bother with them... so these are my first attempts!
The first image is as shot and was one of four shot at different exposures. I imported these into Photomatix and the result is image 2. Tried the automate HDR process in CS4 (by means of comparison) and it didn't align the images correctly so gave up... am sure this is me and CS4 is capable of better! Final image I just took a single RAW image and underexposed by one stop, then 2 stops, then one above and then two above. Saved the resulting .jpgs and then imported into Photomatix. This seems a little more subtle. As first attempts I'm quite happy with the results. Certainly potential with this: really liked the stone pillars in the second image and can see how used in a more subtle way it can be quite effective. I still hate the full-on garish HDR effect though... Obviously need to play with this some more!
It's something i never tried myself, taking multiple exposures of the same shot, but the results are really good.
ReplyDeleteI have seen it done with various exposures throughout the day from morning to night of say a building and it had quite spectacular results.
Maybe a little project for you although requires some patience i think.