HDR – Tone Mapped, twice!

Here’s a technique that was shared with me, and one that I never even thought of, and that was to tone map the HDR, twice!

While not earth shattering, it does throw up some interesting effects in the end result is a little “grungy” but rather than overall, it seems to occur in smaller pockets of areas. These could be taken further with a little burning and dodging.

The general idea is to process in Photomatix and after being tone mapped, save as a 16BIT TIF, reopen in Photomatix and tone map again.

Here’s a small segment of a photo I used this technique on, a larger photo can be found either here or here

© Safe Harbour

I think the technique may be of use when are there are pockets of shadows, for example, dappled light under a tree. Hope someone finds this useful.

HDR – desaturated selection

We’ve all seen HDR is some shape or form by now, but I was wondering, what would it look like if only a portion of the photo was HDR?

Rather than show you my experiments (and bore the pants off you) I found the best results came from, not only making a portion HDR, but the remaining part of the photo, to be desaturated.

© Meaty Yellow Ford

Isolating subjects, such as the car above, work well with this style. I don’t think it lends itself to landscapes, for example, but why not experiment, it costs nothing.

*Meaty Yellow Ford can be found on my 2009 calendar, click here.