The masking technique described above is a good one to use in HDR photography in general as it allows the removal of any undesired results from Photomatix - there will always be sections of the photograph that need to be manually cleaned-up after using a tool like Photomatix. I believe the best thing to do in this particular instance, as the sky is black, would be to open the HDR shot along the original shots as layers in Photoshop (or equivalent) and then use masking to mask away the noise in the HDR sky and reveal the black sky from one of the other layers.
#Photoshop 5.1 hdr software
Noise Ninja, Lightroom 3/4 noise reduction or one of the many other pieces of software available) to selectively reduce the noise in the areas affected. You can use noise reduction software (e.g. Noise is an issue in general with HDR photography. Personally I'd forget about trying to shoot tonemapped HDR in these situations - I think your original image looks fine. Essentially tonemapping is trying to even out the brightness where that simply isn't practical.Įven if you expanded the range of intital captures you'd still have difficulties with bloom and flare when trying to image dark regions next to extremely bright ones. So the dyanamic range of your original blend is not high enough, hence you have excess noise in the tonemapped result by the processes described above. The point is the dynamic range is huge between the ice and the dark areas. What about the shadow areas of the image? They're lit by reflected light (after bouncing multiple times), distant man-made ambient light, moonlight and starlight etc. Think about what you're photographing, the bright areas of the ice are lit by intense floodlights. The only difference is that if you try and tonemap an image with low dynamic range (hence higher noise) this noise will become very apparent in the output.įundamentally the problem here is that the dynamic range of your scene is far too large. You can tonemap from either high dynamic range or low dynamic range images (the latter is sometimes referred to as "single image HDR" or "fake HDR"). Thus if you have very little noise, you gain extra detail in the shadow and thus have higher dynamic range. It's the difference between the brightest thing you can capture, and the point at which detail is lost to noise in the shadows. Secondly dynamic range is inversely proportional to the image noise floor. This step is known as tonemapping, and is generally responsible for the "HDR look". You produce a high dynamic range image from multiple exposures, but then in order to display the result on a typical low dynamic range monitor you need to convert it down to a low dynamic range image. Firstly it's essential to distinguish between HDR imaging and tonemapping.