Sometimes tone mapping just makes sense, if nothing else, just to bring out the colors and dynamic range that you remember seeing when you took the picture. This shot is a perfect example. I came across this photo from our June trip and I remember seeing it before thinking it was a "throw away". Since I've been shooting everything in RAW I decided to (via RawTherapee and Dynamic-Photo HDR) create a multi-exposure pseudo (because technically it's still a single RAW image) HDR and thought that it turned out pretty good. I didn't take the time to try, but I don't think I could have got these colors and levels from RAW conversion alone... Here's the before completely unedited: And the tone mapped image: I'd love to know what you think!
That's mind boggling. I know there's a hack to make my camera shoot RAW but I'm not quite "worthy" of it yet. Much, much to learn.
i'lll have to try this single image technique on a prior throwaway, i use photomatix, and i like the saturated look
I agree with tone mapping from a single RAW. I've been shooting only RAW on my a300 since Apple released an update that allows them to be viewed in Preview. I find it so much easier to make a faux HDR using Photoshop to adjust the exposure levels after the fact, then blending the files in Photomatix.
I am off work tomorrow and plan on trying to shoot and process some RAW images and see what I can do with them
The biggest thing I learned so far is (at least on the a300) is to shoot at 100 ISO when thinking about RAW to HDR. With enough setting tweaks, maybe 400 ISO is doable, but the level of noise is huge.
