Archive for the 'hdr' Category

Brian Auer of Epic Edits blog announced a community photo project named: Shoot Yourself.

Since I was planning to make a self portrait anyway I took the opportunity and some holiday time from the family to make these below:

HDR

original

LucisArt

I never thought that making self portrait is such a challenge. This set is actually the result of the second self session. The first one simply did not give any reasonable pictures. I know that even this one is far from perfect, but my model was so impatient and sad, I was not able to cheer him up with my usual ice breaking jokes.

This is how I made the pictures:
I used a mirror, my Nikon D80 with the 70-200 F2.8 VR lens and two SB-800 speedlights. One of the SB-800s to my left side as key light fired into a reflecting umbrella in TTL mode compensated with +2/3 and the other as a rim or hair light to my right in manual mode at about 1/32 power both controlled by the commander mode of the built in flash of the camera. (The built in flash fired only to sync the remote ones.)

I was shooting in raw mode and processed the pictures in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: cropped the image and adjusted the white balance, fill light and saturation a bit. I used the outcome of the processing for the ‘original‘ and the ‘LucisArt‘ pictures, where - in case of the latter - I used the LucisArt filter in Photoshop. The ‘HDR‘ one was made from one single raw file using Photomatix for tone mapping.

Oh, and of course I flipped the picture horizontally to place the shutter button to the right side - remember I was using a mirror.

As I wrote just a few posts ago I had discovered Qtpfsgui - an open source High Dynamic Range (HDR) image processing software that runs on Linux - and on Windows and MacOS too.

Now I had the chance to give it a try. Here it is how it went.

First of all I installed a fresh Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) replacing my oldish Debian Sarge on my Dell Latitude C400. I had no joy with the normal desktop install CD because the video controller of this old laptop requires some extra care but the alternate install CD was working fine running the installation in text mode. Don´t worry the installed operating system is fully graphical.

I needed Ubuntu because I wanted an easy ride with installing Qtpfsgui, and after reading it´s Website I learnt that Cyril Lavier has packaged Qtpfsgui for Ubuntu and installing the package is easy like a pie. And it was indeed…

The HDR work-flow in Qtpfsgui is quite similar to the one of Photomatix meaning that it has two major steps:

• creating the HDR image
• tone mapping the HDR image to LDR

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve spent a few days in London on a business trip. I shot a few photos in Greenwich, where my hotel was.

On the first evening I was walking around with an old friend who’s been living and working in London for some 8 months now. I didn’t take my tripod with myself and had to rest my camera on something to take relatively sharp pictures. I set the camera to ISO 400 for the first one.

Where all the money is made

ISO 400 again and lots of vibrance and colour saturation in Lightroom :-).

On the second evening I was wandering on my own starting much earlier and enjoying much more light.

And some HDR at the end

Being an open source advocate I was very glad to read on Digg that there is an HDR software for Linux. Well, it is available for Mac OS X and Windows as well, but the point is GNU/Linux here.
The tool is called Qtpfsgui and it already has a group pool on Flickr.

The GUI of Qtpfsgui seems to be somewhat different from the Photomatix’s one:

The results are quite convincing:

by Malex.org

by Safetyfreak

The pictures above were not made by me - unfortunately - but I’ll try the software soon.

Updated
Read my Qtpfsgui experiment here: Qtpfsgui - The Open Source HDR Solution

Youth Park of Buda was closed in 1982 and has been kept closed since then. Prior to stopping its operation it was a an emblematic venue of rock and pop concerts in Budapest, Hungary for a decade during the communist era.
Due to its scheduled monument status its renovation is quite complicated and still waiting for an appropriate investor.

A Budai Ifjúsági Parkot 1982-ben végelgesen bezárták. Azel?tt budapesti pop- és rock koncerteknek volt jelent?s helyszí­ne a kommunista érában egy évtizeden keresztül.
Védett m?mlék státusza miatt felújí­tása elég komplikált feladat, és régóta vár a megfelel? befektet?re.

Interesting from architectural point of view too /
Építészeti szempontból is jelent?s

Closed since 1982 / 1982 óta zárva

And some HDR again / és végül újra egy kis HDR
No HDR tone mapping HDR nélkül	Gradation to HDR Átmenet HDR-be	Full HDR tone mapping Teljes HDR

Some links about the Park: / Néhány link a BIF-r?l:

• an old photo of the crowd waiting for a concert in the seventies at the Park
  egy régi kép egy koncertre váró tömegröl a 70-es években a Parkban
• an article about the famous concert venue
  egy cikk a hí­res koncert helyszí­nr?l
• an other article about a musical about the Park
  és egy másik cikk egy, a Parkról szóló musicalr?l

The two images below were created from the very same sources.

The first one was enhanced in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. I increased the color saturation of the picture quite a lot.

The second one was tone mapped in the famous Photomatix of HDRsoft. To have the same cropping on this one as well, I imported the tone mapped image into Lightroom and copy’n'pasted the cropping adjustment.

I like both images and I’m not a pro of any of the tools, so please don’t judge them by my work.