 Seen in today's entry is a high dynamic range image of Joshua and Jackee, from the wedding I photographed last Saturday. This is the much anticipated HDR image I referred to in a previous entry. The image was composed from three exposures. I set up the Canon 5D with the Canon 17-40 f/4L lens on a tripod, and shot the three exposures at f/10 (in this particular case, I wanted the resulting image to be sharp everywhere). In post-processing, I imported the RAW images from Lightroom into Photomatix Pro, tonemapped the result, re-imported into Lightroom. After some more adjustments in Lightroom and Photoshop, I had one version completed, which may be found here. The challenge with HDR portraits is three-fold. First, one has to make sure that the subjects stand still for the three exposures; even if the exposures are fired rapidly (I had my exposures set up on a ten second timer, in order to minimize camera shake from pressing the shutter button and to reduce the lag time from one exposure to the next), it's impossible to expect the subjects to stand absolutely still. As a result, one of the compromises of shooting HDR portraits is that you give up absolutely sharpness (in the subjects) in favour of amazing exposure. Second, the HDR technique has a tendency to amplify noise. Even shooting at ISO 100, the noise that will build up after tone-mapping may (will) become significant, and care must be taken to remove it accordingly. Third, the HDR technique will invariably lead to unrealistic representation of the skin tones. What ends up happening is that the skin tones become really dark and harsh. Combined with the second limitation I listed above (the addition of noise), and you might end up with beautiful skin tones transformed into something from a horror movie. So, given the three challenges listed above, it's all too easy to come up with an unflattering (sometimes, frightening) result. One suggestion to improve the result is to convert the colour version into a toned version, which is the image you see in today's entry. Another option is to convert the tonemapped result into a B&W image. Anyway, if you're still not convinced that high dynamic range imaging may work for portraits, then I do have a large gallery of HDR images dedicated mostly to landscapes and cityscapes, which you might enjoy seeing. As always, I do encourage you to chime in with your thoughts by leaving a comment. |
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