Tone Compressor

 

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.

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Tonemap Settings

 

The same photo as before just slightly redone.

As I was uploading photos to flickr I realized that I have not tonemapped any images in a while. And this the image above. I took this image and ran it through Photomatix Pro with the following Details Enhancer settings:

• Strength: 100
• Saturation: 60
• Luminosity: +2
• Light Smoothing: High
• Microcontrast: +6

Tone Settings:

• White Point: 0.808
• Black Point: 0.250
• Gamma: 1.01

Color Settings:

• Temperature: 0
• Saturation Highlights: +1
• Saturation Shadows: 0

Smoothing Settings:

• Micro-smoothing: 2
• Highlights Smoothing: 21
• Shadows Smoothing: 22
• Shadows Clipping: 0

I have a few more similar to this one that I might go over in the next few days.

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Ice Cream Social

 

The Lovable Storke Tower

Last night I went to the freshman Ice Cream Social held in Storke Plaza. It was not so much of a social and more of a large crowd accompanied by some sort of music. I went for the ice cream, I stayed for the night photography.

My goal was to get some HDR shots of the crowds with motion blur from the moving people. Except when I tried to process the photos the movement created a lot of large artifacts. I am falling back to just tonemapping a single image, as seen above. The distortion along the top of the image is from the lens hood, it was either that or a large lens flare from the light I was under.

What will make great night photos will be the trees around campus, they have good under lighting and unlike crowds they tend not to move.

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