I don't know if you are a space nut ... someone who hangs on everything NASA and others do in space ... but you can't be uninterested in the Cassini mission to Saturn. What an amazing piece of engineering and human persistence. Almost 20 years from beginning to end and essentially flawless. And the science they accomplished ... it is hard to even comprehend everything they discovered. Such an amazing place with the rings and the moons. There may very well be primitive life on at least one of those moons. And what a spectacular place Titan has turned out to be. An actual methane driven atmosphere with a 'water' cycle of evaporation, rain and flowing rivers along with large lakes of liquid methane. There will be more missions to explore this moon and all the others plus someone will eventually put a probe into the Saturn atmosphere that can survive for some time and see exactly what lies at it's core. Put the pressures and temperatures are extreme so it will have to be a truly magnificent machine. I won't be around for it but my kids will.
Heceta Light - redux
Last time I showed you a picture of the Heceta Lighthouse, in Oregon. It was done using HDR and Photomatix. I had some major issues with that image and finally was pushed to make the leap to blending in Photoshop as a way of fixing the problems. In particular, when you use tone mapping to blend different exposures, major defects show up. For one, if there is any noise in the images, tone mapping accentuates them horribly until they look like popcorn all over your image. The only way to eliminate this graininess is to either noise reduce all the bracketed images before you run through HDR or to aggressively noise reduce the final image afterwards. The image from last time used the latter approach. But removing all this noise also softens the image and it just doesn't look all that attractive. Second, any dust on the sensor really shows up in the final image. I had to remove dozens of these spots from the HDR image. It takes time and the results aren't always that good. I have some images that I can't even show you because the sky is just so "dirty" from the HDR process that it's embarrassing. Finally, the tone mapping process distorts the true colors in the image and I often see sunsets that are just "weird" and not nearly true to what I saw. So, especially with sunrise/sunset images I have to find another process that isn't so brutal to my vision.
A few months ago I found a photographer who has come to the same conclusion. His name is Jimmy McIntyre, a scotsman. He tried HDR and was not impressed. He has developed a complete set of actions for Photoshop that make blending bracketed shots almost easy and the results are really nice. Not to say there are's issues but one can always find ways to correct them. I bought a set of his actions a while back (RyaPro) that are a big help and he's put together a complete course that you can buy at the same time that shows how to use blending to get really spectacular images. I'm not shilling for him and not getting any compensation for telling you about his stuff ... just pointing out a nice resource to make blending in Photoshop a bit easier.
Anyway, a few days ago I jumped into this whole blending process and ran the bracketed images of the lighthouse as my first attempt. It wasn't easy and wasn't without some issues but the result, shown below, is a big step up from the HDR image I showed last time (I've included both below so you can toggle back and forth to see the differences). Notice how much sharper the blended image is. There were almost no dust spots in the blended image and the noise was much reduced. Also, notice how the water by the white walls is distorted and softened in the HDR image. I see that quite often in HDR images and am not sure what causes it. Almost always shows when transitioning between dark and light areas. It's called a halo and is a big artifact of HDR. I've lost count of the images I've had to throw away because a halo showed up when I got into Lightroom.
So compare these images. Don't worry about the contrails, I just didn't take the time to remove them from the HDR image. But look at the lighthouse and especially the light. The red roof is actually red in the blended image, not magenta like in the HDR. And the sunset just looks more natural, don't you think? I really like how this image came out. So if you use HDR and it's not really making you feel great about your images, look into Jimmy's stuff and study blending in Photoshop. There are a lot of nice tools there just for this process. It's actually forcing me to learn how to use PS ... not a bad upside to the whole process.
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| Heceta Light - HDR version |
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| Heceta Light - Blended version |
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