
Goleta dock tone compressed.
Last Friday I took several pictures of a dock in the distance lit by several lamps and mainly moonlight. I thought it would make a great high dynamic range photograph. I ran into problems as the middle exposure was at twenty seconds so I had to use a timer and the bulb setting to get higher f-stops. Even then I only went two stops above instead of three or sometimes four that I normally do. I did not think that this would cause problems.
Well, it did. Several hours with Photomatix details enhancer did not yield any appreciable results. Instead I turned to the other tonemapping method of Tone Compression. With the following settings I get the photo above:
- Brightness: 10
- Tonal Range Compression: 9
- Contrast Adaptation: -8
- White Point: 5.30%
- Black Point: 0.00%
- Color Temperature: 0
- Color Saturation: +1
Another small benefit of Tone Compression is that it processes a lot faster then details enhancer.