This is another experiment with the Dynamic Photo HDR application and another shot from the gloomy Sunday at the coast. DPHDR gives you all kinds of options for fine tuning the tone mapping, even from a single .jpg…and it produces a well rendered image with very little haloing (halo is the light band where dark sections of the image meet light sections, common in HDR work…or it is a similar light band around individual pixels that limits the smoothness of tones in HDR work.) Final adjustment in Lightroom using a Graduated Filter effect to lighten the sky was required to keep the whole thing from going surreal. As you may have noted, I don’t mind hyper-real images, but I do try to avoid the surreal look of overcooked HDR.

For comparison, here is the pure Lightroom version.

The Lightroom version is perhaps a bit truer to the mood of the day. It was undeniably gloomy. But the DPHDR version has more impact as an image. I am going to have to pay more attention…take some shots intentionally to test and challenge my memory for light values before I can say which one is “truer” to reality…to the naked eye view.

Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/640th @ ISO 160. Program with iContrast and –1/3 EV exposure compensation.

Processing as above.

And just for fun, here it is rendered as a paining in Dynamic Auto Painter, with the original overlayed in PhotoShop Elements as a grayscale using Vivid Light to bring up more detail.