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.

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

Creating the HDR image in Qtpfsgui is quite straightforward: you click on the New HDR icon and select your input image or images.

You might modify a few mystic settings for creating the HDR but it is not really necessary:

Click on the Next button and you are set: your HDR image is generated.

Before you can go to the fun part – the tone mapping – you have to save the generated HDR image.

Tone mapping in Qtpfsgui – that can be started by clicking on the Tonemap the HDR button – has way much more possibilities than you find in Photomatix. Qtpfsgui implements several tone mapping algorithms (so called operators) that you can choose from. Furthermore you have the possibility to display several differently tone mapped images on the screen at the same time.
Just click on any of the tabs of the different operators, play around with the sliders and then click on Apply and your tone mapped image will appear.
The title of the image window holds the name of the operator and the values of each parameter you used to create the image. The same meaningful info is offered in the filename when you save your tone mapped LDR image.

I put here a sample screenshot that I captured when working with a HDR image generated from a single raw file (NEF actually since it was coming out of my Nikon D80).

With this single input image I got the most appealing results with the Fattal algorithm.

My original plan was to try to create a tone mapped image in Qtpfsgui that is similar to the one I created with Photomatix. Then I realized that it´s not possible due to the fact that the two tools are using different algorithms for tone mapping. However see below the closest matches:

For playing around with the different operators in Qtpfsgui I was using an output resolution of 512x… to save some time with the image generation. (Tone mapping can be quite CPU intensive.) When I was satisfied with the result of the Fattal tone mapping operator above I wanted to create the LDR image in its original size (10 megapixel). It took extremely long time – due to the poor resources of my old laptop – and I was pretty surprised because the resulted colours of the big picture were quite different from the small one´s.

This was Sunday morning when I wrote an email to Guiseppe Rota – who was writing and is still maintaining Qtpfsgui – asking him what I did wrong. When I was checking my email Sunday afternoon his answer was already in my mailbox. He suggested reading two threads on the topic on the Flickr Qtpfsgui discussion forum about this phenomena here and here. Could I have such a support for a commercial software?

Qtpfsgui resources:

• The official Qtpfsgui Web site on Sourceforge.net
• Online manual
• Tutorial on HDR and Qtpfsgui in Ubuntu

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

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

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 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.