My namesake on an evening prowl yesterday. The sunset was beautiful and I tried to capture both kitty and sky in one shot. The data is there (as in: no clipping) but I struggled a lot to compress the dynamic range to match what my HDREyes made of it .
I would be curious how you guys would handle this - especially the transition from the sky to the foreground. I struggled getting that right with TE.
I decided to bring the cat just barely in, to my eyeballs, the mid-tones. I think it winds up being a bit darker overall, which might be something I would change after sitting with it a bit.
EDIT: Yeah it needed a little more light and saturation. I was losing contrast between the cat and the lawn, so did not push it. Obviously masking the varmint would probably be a smart move (but that is against my religion).
I can’t do much with the sky, either. It is as much as 3.5 EV higher than the reach of the Tone Equalizer. Color Balance RGB brought in some out of gamut color (like a vivid pink). I’m still looking at things.
I don’t usually go with double tone mappers, but this seemed to fit the bill. I think the clouds lose some contrast behind the plants and there’s an annoying fringe on the building now. Otherwise quite pleased with the result.
I nearly threw this into the too hard basket. I am glad I didn’t. I tried loading the xmp file from @Attila_Low but the result was scrambled. What software was used for that please. I then loaded @Popanz xmp and seeing how he used the exposure module set me on a decent path to editing. Also @mino I show my ignorance, but what is HDRE? 260824_203703_DSC07493.ARW.xmp (36.1 KB)