HDR of Gaganachukki Falls

This is 3 exposure bracketed HDR of Gaganachukki falls. The shots were taken during my solo bike ride to Shivanasamudra and Talakaadu on 03-Aug. I had taken 5 shots however it did not come out so well and hence limited final composition to 3 bracketed shots in Luminance HDR. There was huge crowd as expected and bracketing steady shots was difficult. I found a wall along the steps where I could place the camera to compose bracketed shots without any mis-alignment.

Even with 3 bracketed shots there were slight problems. At the edges of the hills there were fringing which could be noticed only after thorough investigation. For normal viewers, it may not be noticeable but people in landscape photography forums do notice such fine details. I was really annoyed seeing it. Eventually I wanted to correct it by some means. First I gave a try reducing chromatic aberration tool in GIMP which did not work out (or I did not use it properly?). The next option was to select the damaged part of image and reduce saturation values for those colors. The major dis-tractors were cyan and red. I chose Hue-Saturation tool and selected cyan and red and teared down the value to -100%. Bingo! all fringes are gone :-). I was really excited after seeing the result. Hope you will enjoy the image too! One more thing I learned was to bracket only 3 shots for HDR during broad daylight. I believe more bracketing is required only during magic hours. Please let me know if you have any alternate opinions.

So why do I struggle so much for HDR? As mentioned in earlier blogs, the natural world looks so beautiful in HDR. Our eyes have greater dynamic range while cameras do not have. The cameras which do have are highly expensive. Hence this sort of circus is required ;-). Once again I did the same mistake, not shooting RAW. I don't know when will I correct myself.

GAGANACHUKKI FALLS
Settings:

Camera: Canon EOS 550D
Lens: 18-55mm kit lens
Focal Length: 18mm
Focus: Manual
Aperture: f/22 (of-course to get vast depth of field)
ISO: 100
Picture Style: Neutral (Thought of increasing sharpness later)
Metering: Center weighted average
No of images: 3 (initally 5)
Exposures: -2,0,+2 (initially -2.-1,0,+1,+2) (1/30s for middle one)
ML Firmware: v2.3
Softwares: Luminance HDR (Fatal operator), GIMP

No comments:

Post a Comment