HDR for broad range single shots

The original shot done on the run is here:




Here's another shot in which the foreground was too dark before making an HDR out of it. I was in the Manhattan Village Parking Lot a few minutes after sundown on November 22, 2008. Sometimes the number of stops in an image requires HDR to view the full range. I had to be somewhere so I didn't have time to set up and shoot it for an HDR. It was just one of those see it, shoot it, and run shots. The sunset was too good to pass up. I always shoot in RAW format which gives me 12 bits at least in each channel making it a MDR or medium dynamic range photo.

I used 5 exposures which I generated in Lightroom. I do this so I can control the noise on each exposure. I have tried this in Photomatix but the noise removal in that program doesn't even remotely compare. I also make sure the Black levels are off (set to 0) as it eliminates white and black dots caused by color peaking. Other than noise and black level adjustments, I set my exposures here on single image RAW files. Generally this is all I do in Lightroom although there are exceptions to that statement which I'll explain in another post with another image. I believe I did use Lightroom to crop it too.

I did tonemap it in Photomatix. To get to Photomatx I used Lightroom's plugin which creates temporary 16 bit TIFFs with Lightroom's edits. Photomatix then in turn will generate an HDR after it determines what exposures you want there. I simply use the values in set in Lightroom (generally 0, +/- 2, +/-4) as Photomatix makes its own guess. I haven't compared the two yet but I will. I used photoshop for a final tuneup which usually involves using the image adjustment levels command and if necessary noise reduction.

Though not a true HDR, I think you'll see that turning an MDR image into a 32 bit per channel radiance file, and then processing like an HDR gets more out of a picture when the original picture range has more than 5 stops.

As I've written below there already is a very large debate on what a High Dynamic Range is and isn't so I won't try to to get into that discussion here. You may read more about that subject if you like at:

Mixmaster's HDR discussion

I believe he provides links with more information as well.