Kodachrome HDR - Yes, you read that correctly ...
Kodachrome HDR - Yes, you read that correctly ...
I think I posted one from this series here before, as I've been working on it for a number of years off and on now.
Before Kodachrome vanished to that great K-Lab machine in the sky, I had an idea of trying HDR with it, and shot a number of bracketed slides of a "cliche'" scene in downtown Omaha, using a tripod and using care to keep everything in position as I changed exposure. These were all done using a GIII and a bulb release.
The one immediately below is probably the best one I've gotten so far, but I'm not satisfied with it and found the process both rewarding and frustrating!
I also admit that it really doesn't look very HDR-ish, which is a good or a bad thing, depending on if you like HDR or not in general.
🙂 🙂
I'm gonna go as far as to call this an almost-HDR, since the "tonemapping" was done manually with layer masks in Gimp, to subordinate the light portions of the light image and the dark portions of the dark image and such.
Here are the three originals used for the above shot. You will see that yes, the final one above does have the detail of the backlit evening clouds from he darkest of the three, and some of the preserved detail under the trees from the lightest of the three.
Now you might be thinking along the line of why don't I use one of the HDR programs such as Luminance-HDR or something? Well, I've tried it.
I've had great luck using Luminance-HDR on bracketed shots from the {d-word} cameras, but for this project here the results have been between ugly and very ugly!
The following is one of the "better" ones using the three images above on Luminance-HDR.
Notice the artifacts in the detail of the clouds!
🙁
Here's a close-up of that, from another attempt.
I have NO CLUE what causes it! I've tried every option, every profile, every tone map type, even a test where I tweaked the exposure difference of the three to 0.1 f stops and it STILL produces that dirt in the sky!
AAAAARRRRRGH!
🙁
Anyway, I'll probably go back to the project as soon as I have more ideas of what to try.
🙂