Brainstorm? Bracketed slides -> HDR?

dmr

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Has anyone ever tried something like this?

If so, any success? What software did you try?
 
I don't see why one should try this?
It is not going to look better than digital HDR and not much like film, so why spend so much?
 
I don't see why one should try this?
It is not going to look better than digital HDR and not much like film, so why spend so much?

Not that I'm gonna spend that much. I have quite a few sets of three bracketed slides and I was thinking, dangerous as it might be.
 
As a follow-up, I did a "proof of concept" test today using three bracketed Kodachrome slides that I took back in 2009.

I used the Luminance HDR package, which took three .tif scans fine as long as I entered the exposure values manually.

I know there are some ghosting and registration issues here, some of which may be able to be fixed with Gimp and/or better use of the auto-align function. (With one option it gives totally blank images.)

Anyway, this is what I got on a first try ...

Closer view here: http://www.demare.me/gallery/var/albums/hdrtest1.jpg

hdrtest1.jpg
 
No reason it shouldn't work with correct registration.

Sometimes I blend two or three scans (with different exposures) of an image where the information is on film but hard to get digitally.
 
Done it, works great for getting a bit more shadow detail on positives. In Photoshop, I use File->Scripts->Load Files into Stack, and then make sure the "align images" option is checked.

Here's some 6x12 images where I did this:

Untitled1sharps.jpg


Untitled2s.jpg


I don't see why one should try this?
It is not going to look better than digital HDR and not much like film, so why spend so much?

More shadow detail. HDR is a bad word for it as HDR is so overdone these days.
 
Done it, works great for getting a bit more shadow detail on positives. In Photoshop, I use File->Scripts->Load Files into Stack, and then make sure the "align images" option is checked.


More shadow detail. HDR is a bad word for it as HDR is so overdone these days.

Well HDR is simply High Dynamic Range, some people over do it, but doesn't necessarily need to be overdone to count as HDR.
 
Well HDR is simply High Dynamic Range, some people over do it, but doesn't necessarily need to be overdone to count as HDR.

In my experience 95% of the people saying they use "HDR" do it way over the top to the point of disgusting oversaturated garbage, so yeah I think it's a bad term :D.

Besides which, bracketing and compositing slides gives maybe 7-8 stops of range - still not really "HDR" in the technical sense! :)
 
I think in regards to digital the latitude is maybe around 4 to 6 stops after it's been edited. A single slide seems like it has less latitude. If you have more than that 8 stop range, it would be hard to include it all without losing it's sort of "natural" look.

These are (digital) HDRs of mine, least in the process they're used to be created (usually 7 to 14 shots in 0.7ev increments).

E-M5, Canon Serenar 35mm f/2.8 (1951) LTM, 1 minute to 1 second in 1 stop increments at f/8. During a snow storm.

_t300070_hdr_1920_by_kbeezie-daxclvv.jpg


Couple weeks earlier when it was clearer out, same lens.
7ea850b6246a3c89dfdf6fbcb8e0f77e


E-M5, Olympus 12/2.0, 14 exposures from 1/15th to 30 seconds, f/5.6 (kind of pushing in regards to the 'glow' and saturation)

_t180023_hdr_1920_by_kbeezie-dallkee.jpg


And an Infrared HDR (several exposures in infrared to get the shadows/highlights, then a merging of the same thing in color, then sandwich those two to bring back some of the green/blue)

grand_river_in_infrared_by_kbeezie-da4sqwn.jpg
 
Karl? How did you align the images?

On the one I did I tried the auto-align in Luminance HDR but the one method kind of worked and the other produced a totally black image. What I ended up doing was getting them close using Gimp, but not really pixel to pixel and the auto-align helped but was not perfect.

Thinking back, I probably moved a bit, actually changed my perspective a wee bit, several seconds between shots. I'm sure the auto-align expects the images to be very close to begin with.
 
For those who care, :) here's another attempt using a different set of three bracketed slides from the same shoot.

This one I did manually using layer masks in Gimp to map the tonal range from the shadows of the overexposed to the highlights of the underexposed. I like this one a lot better and find it looks far more natural than the ones done with the HDR software.

I also paid far more attention to getting the images aligned.

hdtest3b.jpg
 
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