[mavrick]

I have never really done any photo editing besides the basic adjustments allowed in my photo viewer and was wondering if someone could do me a favor and try merging a couple of pictures for me. I have no idea how the photo would turn out but if someone is able to merge them into a decent photo it will give me something to work towards. thanks in advance. set 1

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set 2

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set 3

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[mike]

Those jpg's are already stepped on pretty hard. Do you have RAW files? edit: there is quite a bit of detail in the shadows without merging.

However that nikon should be giving waaaay better results. The detail is pretty much mush in this crop of the full size. Don't know where it went, maybe flickr? Not worth farting around until you can post something we can work with.

[puzzlr]

If those were my exposure bracketed photos I wouldn't use them. The exposures are too different and the contrast between them is severe. With a LOT of work you might get a blend that's not too unrealistic. With a few minutes I got this, but there's a lot of bad fringiness and other color contrasts that would take a lot of work to fix. I agree with Mike that a lot of detail is blobbed out.

Blended

My Photomatix Pro HDR tool couldn't even recognize the two photos as similar enough to align them and produced junk.

[mavrick]

Thanks for the efforts. Yea like I said I don't have any experience with this so wasn't really sure what I needed to do to have a better chance at the pictures turning out decent. Sounds like the first mistake was not shooting in RAW resulting in a loss of data. Also, the exposures are too different, so I should have shot photos that were more similar. Would it have been better to do 3 or 4 pictures with two more between the two exposures provided?

[puzzlr]

I don't want to pretend to be an HDR expert, but I've been trying it out for a few years and developed a few rules for myself that help. Shooting: I normally shoot auto-mode JPEG when the lighting and the subject is "normal". My camera has two custom setting positions I set up, one for Raw, and one for 3-shot aperture bracketed Raw +- 1 1/3 stops. It's very easy to switch to these during a hike so I'm not fiddling with the camera a lot. If the subject is special or the light is a little challenging I'll shoot Raw to allow for more adjustment later, and I aperture bracket if there is a lot of contrast in the scene, or haze and I want to pull something out. Normally I just do a hand held shot, but for a special scene when there's time I'll use my 2oz mini tripod, but that's rare because I'm lazy. The combination of image stabilization in the camera and auto alignment in the HDR tool work good enough for me. Real photographers will harumph Post Processing: I use three tools: Photomatix or Lightroom for the merge and Photoshop for additional blending. Usually merging just the the high and low exposure works as well as merging all 3 shots. A time consuming part is that each HDR photo is unique so you can't just batch them all. In Photomatix I've built up a dozen presets from twiddling the knobs from different photos. Lightroom merge has no knobs but produces a DNG file with 16-bit depth (instead of the 8-bit single shot depth) so then the sliders work with a much bigger range, but you need to tweak each photo. Over time I've been using Photomatix less and less because Lightroom produces more natural looking photos. Post Post Processing: The photo coming out of a straight HDR merge is ok but often fake looking. To get really stunning results you need to bring in the best original shot (usually the middle one) and the HDR merge into two layers in Photoshop and do a custom blend that uses the best parts of each. This is very time consuming, requires learning blending skills, and I rarely do it. But it results in a natural looking photo with great highlights. In this case it would have been helpful to take more Raw shots at different apertures to get two that have closer colors in the trees. With the two you have, one has light green trees and other has orange trees. You'll never get those two to look good without crazy Photoshop manipulation. I don't shoot directly into the sun much, but that's another situation where more exposures and a wider range might be useful.

[mike]

What puzzlr said. RAW gives the most detail in difficult situations however I think there is something going on with your full size jpgs. The Nikon D40 should put out stellar jpg's so I think something happened when you posted them. I suggest opening them in a viewer like Faststone Image Viewer (freebie) and compare original with the posted images. One thing I notice with the D40 is that jpg quality is low when shooting jpg + raw. So shoot high quality jpg or shoot raw otherwise you have to manually generate the high qualty jpg's in post.