No backstory here. Just a sunset on Lake Superior.
Here’s a re-worked version - cloned out the weird rock and used a TK luminosity mask to massage the midtones a little lower. Also raised the exposure slightly…ah I don’t know.
Impressions, thoughts, ideas for improvement welcome.
Technical Details
Is this a composite: No
Lumix G9
Lumix Vario G 12-35mm f/2.8 lens @ 12mm (24mm equiv.)
f/16 | 1/40 sec | ISO 200
Tripod
5-image HDR Blend
Lr processed for the HDR merge, lens correction, brush and graduated filter work to even out tones that weren’t quite right. Used the Linear Profile Tony made for the G9 to start with. Very different experience processing. Photoshop to remove a couple of bright sticks in the foreground.
Tell us more about linear profiles… Does it give more natural HDR results? The little I know about them is from past flirtations with astrophotography, but they require processing beyond the capabilities of our digital darkrooms.
A beauty Kris. The composition is spot on and I really like the subtle highlights on the rocks. That curved shore line brings me right to the sun. Not much experience with HDR but I guess you would need more exposures than just sun and FG. Did you do water as well?
Thanks Diane - natural HDR was almost unheard of back in the day, wasn’t it? But I try to make mine come out that way. I renamed it in my head Human Dynamic Range - I try to mimic how your iris opens and closes very slightly as your eyes move through a scene. You will open up those shadows and close down those highlights naturally, but there are limits.
Well, I’m still playing with this, but I’d say on the whole, yes. I did a little experiment. Processed an HDR merge of 5 with my normal import setting in place - camera matching which for landscapes is “Scenery” in the G9. I think this setting bumps contrast & saturation, but not as much as the “Vivid” setting would do, but more than “Natural”. The resulting merged file had more contrast and color as a result.
I made virtual copies of those RAW files and changed the starting profile to Tony’s Linear Profile for the G9. This flattened them considerably - very low contrast and very low saturation. The resulting HDR merge from this was also flatter, but seemed to control the highlights better (texture in the water) and preserve detail in the logs and rocks of the foreground.
When I run an HDR merge in Lightroom I have it on Auto develop settings just as a starting point. You can turn this off in the process or turn it off in the Basic panel later if you so desire. I can show you both of those images if you like - the 5-shot merge with no develop settings changed and the ones with Auto.
It’s a weird process with the Linear Profile in terms of starting point. We are all used to Adobe RAW settings when you first open an image in Lr or ACR - whether it’s a default setting or one we’ve chosen, or even Camera Matching and they all bump things around to make them more pleasing to our tastes upon first review. Linear seems to remove all of that and in my estimation might require even more extreme slider settings than when the initial changes are buried (not shown in the slider settings). It shows how much profiles and camera settings seem to alter a RAW file even before we see it. There are more changes done to a bunch of 1s and 0s that come off the sensor than we realize and those are not reflected in the slider positions when we first see them. I know I just said that twice, but it bears repeating.
I don’t know that Linear Profiles are going to be embraced by anyone new to photography because it does the opposite to a photo to what we think looks good. But once you have a few years under your belt and understand and embrace the more subtle demands of good processing, it might be a way to gain better control over images from the very start. You know when you have an idea of how you want you shot to end up and just can’t get there - maybe it’s too contrasty or has a weird cast or just not the right color depth - this might get you close to where you want it.
Thanks Mario. I really liked this composition with the giant log and that shoreline - you can walk all the way along it to the point if you want. It’s a really lovely park.
I used a 5-shot exposure bracketing series with 2/3 stops change between each one. I think I also started off with a -1 or -2/3 exposure to begin with in Aperture priority. So in other words I took a meter reading, saw it was too high for the highlights and move Exposure Compensation lower to keep those from being too blown out. The bracketing starts with that setting and moves through the rest of the shots from there with 2/3 of a stop changes for each. Make sense?
A great composition, Kris, and lovely colors. IMHO, it looks much too HDR’ish, however. I mean, you’re looking into the sun, so there will not be many mid tones in the scene. The sky and water would be brighter, as would the shadows on the beach. I played with it and made a few smallish changes that, I think, made a difference and made it a little more natural looking. What I was TRYING to do was 1) brighten the sky and increase contrast somewhat there. 2) do the same with the water. 3) open the shadows a we bit in the wooded area in the upper left, and 4) brighten/increase contrast on the beach, but keep saturation natural looking. 5) i love the tree trunk in the FG, so I dodged the back side just to be able to see a little more of it, but not so much to make it look fake looking. Whether it worked or not is up to you.
Thanks Bill - I think you’re right about the mids, so I re-worked the image. I like my saturation levels though so I left it there, but brightened it somewhat.
Kris, a great sunset scene. I love the composition, the sweeping arc of the shoreline creates such an expansive look. And despite the nice sunset, I don’t think this image works anywhere near as well without the log, for me it really ties the whole image together, and take it up a notch above “just another pretty sunset”. I like the changes that you made in your rework, getting rid of the rock at the bottom center helps a lot.
My suggested tweaks are more subjective in nature, I do think your rework works perfectly fine as presented however. First, for me the yellow/orange saturation is just slightly too strong. So here is a rework using TK saturation masks. One mask selected the most saturated colors (yellow orange primarily) and I used that to slightly drop saturation. A second TK saturation mask selected the less saturated colors (sand and blue sky), and then I increased saturation for those less saturated colors. Here is a rework reflecting that
Something weird is going on with my computer, I’m getting some strange color space shift issues with my reworks, this rework above is not what I intended. I will try to fix it and repost another rework. But the concept of using TK saturation masks to balance saturation by the technique discussed above is a method worth knowing about.
Kris, (and @Diane_Miller) the concept of using Liner Profiles to do HDR Merges is an interesting one. The use of linear profile is not inherently connected to HDR, but the flat, dark, low contrast “raw” image produced by the use of a linear profile makes it easier to protect highlights, especially in the sky. The use of a more normal “Scenery” profile with HDR Merge does not protect highlights quite as well as using linear. With linear you then have to process the merged DNG file a bit differently, but your highlights are better protected. You then have a bit more control over how your HDR image will look.
Whether one uses LR Merge to HDR, or like me, uses bracket and manual blend via Luminosity masks, the use of linear profile is worth experimenting with. When doing manual blending, I always need a really dark bracket to protect the area right around the sun (assuming my raw file is “Adobe Color” profile. Using Linear Profile may reduce the need for that extra dark bracket. After reading Tony Kuyper’s article last week, I had been thinking about trying linear profiles in conjunction with a manual exposure blend, but hadn’t gotten around to doing it yet. Kris, your post here illustrates for me that it makes a lot of sense to try doing this.
Kris I don’t want to hijack your thread, but I’ll post some more about this in a new thread.
When the dynamic range needs taming, I can often get a better result with Adobe Neutral – it gives lower contrast similar to linear, but undoubtedly linear is a step above it. I hadn’t know about this and am very excited to play with it! Looking forward to @Ed_McGuirk’s post!
As Tony put it, Linear is an even more “conservative” version of Adobe Neutral, and in my view this has advantages for controlling extreme highlights. and as Tony’s article discusses, using linear makes the subsequent use of sliders more “natural” and “easier” to control. This also applies to the DNG file output by HDR Merge. Even when using Merge with “auto” checked, I almost always made further tweaks ot the DNG file.
One of the things that I want to play with is blending exposure brackets where Linear is used for the sky brackets, and Adobe Standard for the land brackets. This might protect the sky better, but not have the land as dark in the starting DNG.
I have to go out to run some errands, but a quick and dirty stab at this suggests it does help to do this, and gives you the best (or better) of both worlds as a starting point.
