Blame it on the summer sun…  Yeah, it creates all this dynamic range in the luminosity that we have to deal with.  I know that I’ve been (over)-emphasizing HDR stuff lately, but I had to do one more entry on the HDR – or maybe I’ll do a bunch more, I don’t know yet!  Anyway, I decided to do a comparison and see how it all shakes out in a more or less  challenging but representative image.  So, dear friends, here we go, first with a standard image with best-effort-in-about-one-minute processing; an HDR image generated using Tone Compressor mode; and an HDR image processing using the Detail Enhancer…

Standard Processing

HDR Tone Compressed

HDR Detail Enhanced

Processing on the standard image consisted of basic adjustments in ACR,  including refinements in Exposure, Recovery, Fill Light, Blacks, and Clarity.  For the Tone Compressed image I applied the Overlay move to further enhance detail in the highlight (clouds).  In the Details Enhanced image I had to blend the image with the results of the post-conversion processed version of  the Tone Compressed image to reduce a very strong dark halo effect in the clouds.

The standard image is about all we could hope for given the scene and time-of-day.  There is good detail in the river and in the greenery, but of course the sky and clouds are completely gone.  In the Tone Compressed image these problems are eliminated.  Perhaps the greenery is a bit over-saturated, but when did we ever complain that the color is too strong – we can easily reduce this if desired.  I like what happens with the water too – a natural result of combining several images recorded using different shutter speeds.   The detail in the clouds is even better with the Details Enhanced image, and here if anything, the greenery seems a little under-saturated.  I also like the water here – maybe even better than in the Tone Compressed image.

The source images were recorded on June 19 at 13:30 PST, at the Wildwood Recreation Site, just east of milepost 39 along Oregon Highway 26.  I used the Nikon D700 with the AF-S VR Zoom-NIKKOR 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G IF-ED lens at 70mm.  Exposures were f/18 at 1/250s, 1/160s, 1/100s, 1/60s, 1/40s, 1/25s and 1/15s.  ISO was set at 200.  White balance set to Auto.

Detail Enhancer settings:

Luminosity:  0

Strength:  100

ColorSaturation:  46

WhiteClip:  5.000000

BlackClip:  5.000000

Smoothing:  High

Microcontrast:  10

Microsmoothing:  0

Gamma:  1.000000

HighlightsSmoothing:  0

ShadowsSmoothing:  0

ShadowsClipping:  0

ColorTemperature:  0

SaturationHighlights:  0

SaturationShadows:  0

Tone Compressor settings:

Brightness:  3

Compression:  4

Contrast:  2

WhiteClip:  0.000000

BlackClip:  0.000000

ColorTemperature:  0

Saturation:  0