Sunset over the Arno river in Florence. View from Ponte Santa Trinita. Three photos were taken without a tripod, so they must have been
aligned with easyHDR before being merged together into a HDR radiance map. Only minor changes to the tone mapping settings were made as
compared to the default values. A bit more "Compression" and a bit less of "Mask->Strength" and "Mask->Brightness". Some of the
reconstructed dynamic range was clipped by setting the histogram white point to 0,13%. By doing this the Sun looks a bit more overexposed,
but the entire photo has better contrast. The "Local contrast" feature introduced even stronger boost at local level making the clouds a
little bit more dramatic.
Dwarf pine on the slopes of Sniezka mountain, on the Czech Republic side. Only 2 photos were used - one underexposed and one exposed at camera's automatic settings.
The photos were taken without a tripod and were later manually aligned with easyHDR.
The "Local Contrast" feature was used in easyHDR to get a more dramatic look of the clouds and to bring out more detail in the snow.
Old town moat in Wroc³aw. Three hand-held photos (-2, 0 and +2EV) aligned with the manual alignment tool, then
merged to HDR image and tone mapped.
Prazsky Hrad (The Prague Castle). View from the Charles Bridge. Three bracketed shots (-2, 0 and +2 EV) merged and tone mapped.
The full dynamic range is covered by the 0 and -2EV exposures. By adding the +2EV
shot a better signal to noise ratio (SNR) in dark areas was achieved.
Inside the Wroclaw Cathedral. Three bracketed shots (-2, 0 and +2 EV) merged and tone mapped.
Here is a sample evening shot that has a very wide dynamic range. The camera
is not able to cover the full dynamic range that ranges from bright western sky
to dark, east facing slopes and building walls.
EasyHDR and its tone mapping operators can also be used to enhance single JPEG photos. A well exposed photo is enhanced in the example
above to bring out the detail in clouds and to make the colors more vivid.
In the example above the input photo has been deliberately underexposed by 2EV, so there is good detail in the clouds.
RAW PHOTO ENHANCEMENT
The 12-bit RAW images have the same dynamic range as 8-bit per channel JPEGs
converted inside a camera, but they are better subjects to being
processed, because they are not affected by quantisation and JPEG compression
losses on store. The raw photos can be loaded directly into the program and processed
as sigle photos or merged into HDR.
MORE SAMPLE PHOTOS
The Cathedral in Wroclaw, Poland.
Another example of RAW photo enhancement with easyHDR. Simple, stationary tone
compression that is done by the camera (when saving image as JPEG) causes detail loss
in bright areas. With easyHDR you can achieve realistic results that show the true power
of your DSLR camera.
If you want to see in your photograph both detail in brightly lit trees as well
as details in a shadowed cave just as in this example, the HDRi processing
techniques are simply necessary.
The overcast sky is much brighter than ground lit by ambient light.
In an auto exposure photo the sky in such scenes nearly always is overexposed,
there is no cloud detail at all. This example shows how easyHDR can change a
"sad", autumn shot into a colorful and neat photo.
This example shows how High Dynamic Range tone mapping technique can be used to
enhance photos with bright objects in sunlight. These objects get commonly
overexposed which spoils the whole photograph. Note that since the presented scene
doesn't have very wide dynamic range it would be also possible
to achieve a similar effect by processing only the mean exposure photo, but
at the same time the noise level would rise.
