HDR Tutorial – Part 5

In the final part of the tutorial, I will discuss the tone mapping settings I used for each of the example images shown in part 4. Each of these images was generated from the same OpenEXR file. The tone mapping was then performed and the output moved back to Lightroom 2 where I applied the same cropping and a bit of sharpening to each image. I also applied a small amount of vignetting, tuning the darkness of the vignette to the overall image feel.

Photomatix Default Settings

This tone mapping used Photomatix default set of parameters. To revert to this set, which is a reasonable starting point even if it doesn’t do a lot to make this image really jump out at you, choose “Default” from the “Presets” list at the bottom of the “Tone Mapping Settings” window.

The settings are:

An example of how badly you can mess things up

Don’t do this. This is an example of how bad a mess you can make of your image by selecting a low light smoothing setting. This introduces all sorts of hideous haloes and results in what, to me, looks like a muddy smudge. This effect was achieved using the default settings and changing “Smoothing” to “Min”. In this case, I also increased micro-smoothing to 13.5 which merely accentuates the horribleness. The image looks pretty terrible without this change but smoothing the micros just gives it an extra edge.

The settings are:

A monochrome tone mapping

Having got the last one out the way, the next two represent what, to me, are acceptable and pleasant mappings for this particular image. The first is a black and white rendering using similar settings to my favourite colour version but with the image desaturated by moving “Color Saturation” all the way to the left.

The settings are:

My preferred version

Finally, here’s the version I am happy with. The settings here are very typical of my images. I like to accentuate texture so minimise microsmoothing and maximise gamma. To counteract the darkening effect of the high gamma, I increase luminosity, juggling it with the white point to produce something acceptable. In this particular case, I also increased the temperature setting to give a warmer tone to the image.

The biggest challenges using this type of setting are noise in large expanses of slowly varying colour (skies are a pain) and blown out highlights. To fix both these issues, I will open the tone mapped image in Photoshop and blend it with one of the original exposures using a layer mask to control which areas are mixed and which are taken directly from the tone mapped output.

The settings are:

So now we are done and you should have plenty of intellectual ammunition to get you started producing tone mapped HDR images. I hope you have found this tutorial useful. Please use the comment form to let me know of anything you found confusing or just plain wrong and I’ll make updates as needed. Also, please leave comments on the blog and link to your own HDR images so that others can see what folks who have read this have ended up doing with the information.

Thanks for your time and happy snapping!