We plan to have once a month an article with tonemapping samples.
Disclosure: The creators of HDR Darkroom Pro (our report) are sponsors of this site (as of 9/2011). All what we write here is still our own opinion.
We started with handheld bracketed photos from Bryce Canyon (shot with the Canon 1D Mark III and the 70-200mm f/4 IS zoom).
In this case we would have gotten a nice result from a single shot. We still like to get a smoother rendering we can archive with tonemapping.
We merged the images to HDR in HDR Darkroom Pro and performed also the tonemapping.
Lets have a closer look at the settings.
HDR Darkroom Pro offers three tonemapping algorithms. In our report we used the Local Tone Enhancer method. We make the decision based on the image at hand. We find for images of this style the Local Tone Balancer may give smoother results. You can see our settings in the image above. Finding the right settings is overall quite easy.
We only mention the parameters that are not set to default.
- Strength: Lower values show less contrast. Here a value at about 50 is fine
- Local Lighting: Opens up the shadows. Find the best balance of global contrast and nice open shadows
- Saturation: here we wanted to dial the saturation a bit down
- Shadows: Because we opened the shadows a lot we wanted to darken them a bit
- Highlights: To avoid harsh highlights we also toned down the highlights
- Black: We don't often use the Black slider but wanted to givethe image a slightly better black foundation
Here is the result exported from HDR Darkroom Pro:
We always fine tune the result in Photoshop CS5 (learn more about our general workflow). There was not very much to do except some minor tweaks.
Conclusion
It is nice to have the choice of multiple tonemapping methods. As mentioned in our initial report HDR Darkroom Pro is easy to use and gives us the results we aim for.
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