The Humanities and Social Studies building courtyard at UCSB, in HD.
This HDR photo posed a little more challenge then previous ones. In the past when faces with these I did not really like the photo enough to dedicate the time to find a way to solve it. The problem: the night sky.
With many HDR photos taken at night the night sky turns into a mess of noise and artifacts, a result of the processing software. To avoid these using Photomatix Pro I upped the Shadow Clipping and then adjusted the remaining settings to make up for this. In the end this is what I used:
- Strength: 80
- Saturation: 55
- Luminosity: +4
- Light Smoothing: High
- Microcontrast: +10
Tone Settings:
- White Point: 0.604
- Black Point: 0.161
- Gamma: 1.23
Color Settings:
- Temperature: 0
- Saturation Highlights: 0
- Saturation Shadows: 0
Smoothing Settings:
- Micro-smoothing: 2
- Highlights Smoothing: 30
- Shadows Smoothing: 0
- Shadows Clipping: 50
These settings worked well and I used this preset for several other photos taken in the same night.
