Sunday, April 12, 2009

Dynamic Photo HDR, Part Deux

The bottom line here is that the Tone Mapped image looked pretty good in the preview, but once processed it was a dud. The sky looks good, but the windmill is quite flat. Here are the settings I used:
  • Tone Mapping: Eye Catching
  • Brightness: 17
  • Color Saturation: .46
  • Vivid Colors .22
  • Dramatic Light Radius: 6.9
  • Dramatic Light Strength: .72
  • Surface Smoothness: .3
  • Gamma: 1.73
  • Add Clarity: checked
  • De Haze: checked
  • Noise Reduction: checked
One interesting thing I learned is that once I played with Light Tuner and clicked Apply, there was no going back. There is no Undo for that.
There is a fun function called Match Color that emulates the color balance of a variety of painting styles. I don't know that this is useful, but it shows some imagination. There are also a variety of ways to get other extreme looks: Curves, Color Equalizer, and Hue Shift. Perhaps more useful are the wide variety of color filter presets. These range from Mysterious Light, to Orton Sepia, to a really lame Watercolor.
Bottom line: Dynamic Photo HDR does a lot, but in my opinion it does little well.