The idea of HDR photography should be of interest to any landscape or architectural photographer (and thanks to Wikipedia I don’t have to explain why). I have recently been experimenting with HDR and while I’m still working on my workflow for both single and multiple exposures I thought I’d share a little sample test that I did.

My source images were 4 photos taken in Yosemite National Park with a pretty broad exposure range.

350Da Img 5919350Da Img 5926

350Da Img 5931350Da Img 5935

The images were converted from Canon RAW to JPEG in Aperture and run through 3 HDR tools. My goal was to do as little processing as possible and to that end, I did the simplest merge option for each tool and then did a quick shadows/highlights adjustment in Photoshop CS3 for each.

Here were my results:

Photoshop CS3
350Da Img 5919-Pscs3

Photomatix Pro
350Da Img 5919-Photomatix

enfuse
350Da Img 5919-Enfuse

What does this show? Absolutely nothing, really as I didn’t tweak the settings for the tools. Photoshop’s colors are punchier, but I could have pretty easily tweaked the colors/contrast in the other two to get a similar appearance.

But it does show that I can get a pretty good merge using enfuse so I’ll wrap a quick AppleScript around an export/merge/import and that’ll make things just a little simpler for me.

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