Baby's First HDR

I took the Photomatix Pro plunge yesterday (thanks for the advice, Mr. Edge!), and lucked out with the scene I chose to try first. This is Glass Lake in RMNP. The default result was a decent starting point, which made getting to this point easier. Subsequent attempts with other images proved to be a bit more difficult. This image, while far from perfect, is okay for a first attempt, I guess. I'll enjoy shooting for later hdr work in the future.

I must say, though, that it's tough to get these things looking natural. We're so used to the way film interprets the world, and digital's mimicking of that, so it really is a challenge to not fall into the trap I've seen so often of hdr images looking downright clownish.

Well, you definitely avoided the HDR-looks-like-a-cartoon problem here. I like the image overall, but I'd try to tone down the mountain a bit -- everything above the shadowline looks too bright right now.

Maybe photoshop some clouds in there too!

Everything looks good to me about this except (there it is), the rocks in the shadow at middle right have a freakish glow about them. Too light imo, especially since there are no reflections of them in the water, so my brain is saying, HUH!

This looks really good and natural Todd. Very nice. My experience with HDR is that it works great on some images, but on many others I just couldn't get what I wanted no matter how much fiddling I did. It gotten to the point where I only use it as a last resort because I just couldn't rely on it.

What I have found it pretty consistently good for is shots that don't deal with skies (where most of the haloing occurs). Architectural shots are one example and I've also good luck using it when shooting waterfalls when the brightness of the falls sometimes causes shadowed areas to lose all detail. An example is this shot where in order to get the main waterfall properly exposed, the recessed areas were completely black. A four exposure HDR got me what I wanted there.

Save for some blues in the rocks that Morris mentioned, and the slightly 'electric' blue in the sky (both reflected and not), this looks pretty good.

I have to agree with Guy about where HDR seems to work best. I think that better results in landscape/nature images are almost always obtained by combining images in PS and blending and layer masking, where one has so much more control over the output. Tony Kuyper's Luminosity mask adj. layer actions have been a godsend in that department!
Your example could have been done easily the 'old fashioned' way. Probably faster if the amount of tweaking you had to do get it 'look natural' was substantial.

Definitely not a bad first attempt, Todd! A little more post-processing and this will really pop. I'd darken the mountains a touch, add some contrast and burn the mid-ground rocks down a smidge.

Glad you're liking Photomatix. I'm super excited about using it!

To me the reflected sky is a bit too punchy. And I'm not for toning down the mountains unless you also tone down the reflection - they're pretty close to even as-is, and darkening the mountains would probably put you in "too much grad ND" territory.

I find that HDR on mountain scenes with partial lighting like this can be quite difficult to manage, regardless of the tools used. You've done a good job of balancing the exposure.

shadow areas are always a problem with hdr...and one can tell it from this image. I've for some time now...and am using it less and less. however there are few people i know who get fantastic results with hdr tools.

I'm still on the fence about auto-HDR too. I think Photomatix does the best job of the options out there for HDR blending of exposures, but I still find myself putting a lot of work into the image after trying to get the tone mapping as good as possible. I don't think I understand all of the tone mapping options well enough.

Like, John, on most images I get the results I want using luminosity masks and blends - which is HDR work too - just a little more manual.

I am looking forward to trying CS4's image blending for DOF extention.

Your colors look pretty good and I don't see any haloing. I agree that the midground rocks look just a little too light, but I like it overall.

A very effective, disciplined effort here. A scoche more saturated in the blues than I would have gone for, but no tell-tale HDR signs, imo. I'd burn in the middle areas a little, but it's more a matter of personal taste than the HDR output.

Great looking scene, and outstanding image!

Did you open the raw files in ACR first, set all the tone and exposure sliders to 0, and save them as tiffs, before opening them in Photomatix?

That's what Photomatix recommends.

The blues seem to saturated, but it's still a beautiful image.

I'll point this out, not because you did anything wrong, but because it is the type of thing where HDR bugs the hell out of me.

The small snowfields on the upper left have halos forced on them and grit emphasized in the middle. Weird.

I think this looks good for HDR, but there are still little problems. It would be nice if the tone mapping component would allow you to apply some localized adjustments before locking in the calculation.

The mid-tones are a bit hyperactive, but less than I've seen on most photomatix examples.