The TIFF is produced from merging 5 brackets spaced 2EV apart using HDRMerge into a DNG, then I just opened that DNG in RawTherapee, applied neutral (+ CA correction in the TIFF file I uploaded, but the JPG images use a version without CA correction therefore the CA around the lamps etc) and saved it as a 16-bit TIFF. I shot this using my old Pentax K10D which is very noisy by today’s standards, and I did not enable noise reduction in RT, and despite this there is virtually no noise.
The point of this was just to show one way of brightening shadows in a very realistic way using GIMP. I did not have to use GIMP at all to do that, I could have stayed in RawTherapee (and in fact I did for the version I sent to the client). Every shadow-brightening method tries to do the same thing, but is different… “same-same but different”.
WOW really impressive and colourful, must have been a lot of work… ja ja ja those royal cats in the bed are pure elixir of relax mood =) You can tell people living there have put a ton of their time and love in the space
Personally, the problem I have with HDR is that there are so many possibilities, too many… I love ( slide like) restrictitions. And use it a lot 'cause seldom I photograph through large dynamic discrepancies but I’ll admit that not always I’m happy about the ( easiness of the) processing and results. Just so that there are no misunderstandings, this has nothing to do with any method shared here, which are super interesting; though I tend to use lum masks and “blendifs”. I guess that soon enough it would be the “norm” but I still come from the now nostalgic film era… The below is ( colour differences aside) the limit of brightness for me… to keep it “real”
I find it very difficult! I mean getting “some result” is easy (the above are just “some result”), but if you’re shooting something like this where the client knows the exact hue of all used paints and you have to shoot it in mixed lighting (late evening light, candles, CFT) and make sure that the end result has the right hue and chromaticity everywhere, that’s a different story.
I’ll upload the image I sent to the client next time I come across it on my backup HDD, where the hues and chromaticities do match reality.
@chroma_ghost The problem that I have with luminance masks and blendifs is that they sometimes produce rather grainy images with some sharp tone transitions. Maybe it has to do with my lack of skill… In any case, your example isn’t as clean as the tone mapping combos, though the light is more believable.
@afre I can tell you’ve got the boxing gloves on…
I prefer it manly, also 'cause of speed, if you’re trying to slice a lemon with a machete (my case), you’d appretiate the steel gloves, furtherturtle masks can be sharp or blured, dithering may depend on method used and colour of aura, blendifs like dark beverages and huge blonde wigs, my render example has grain added and an second thought extra boost in exposure because the chicken called, cut the crap and lets have a beer!!!
Sorry @chroma_ghost. Meant to say that it is more challenging to use masking than global manipulation. In that room, tea or cider might be a more suitable beverage .
My new Nikon by default takes photos like the resulting image here. I call these types of photos or images great for evidence purposes! As far as my taste, I prefer to see or preserve some (realistic) shadows.
As such, I set my Nikon D5600’s defaults to “Exposure Compensation -0.3” and “Flash Compensation -1.7”.
However, every now and then we do have to work with a poorly exposed photo, and will certainly try to remember this write-up for my next encounter! I have yet to be able to get adequate desirable realistic lightening of any poorly exposed photo/image, hopefully this will help. It’s more of a question as to whether resolution has been permanently lost in the darker shadows/areas of the image.
Now I feel really dumb… I just didn’t look in the right place. I looked in “Filters” and “GEGL operations”…
It is there in Color > Tone mapping. Thanks @afre and @bminney.
Good strobemansship will always* lead to more natural light than good postprocmansship. Even if there are multiple light sources and can’t see any of them in the photo, the light is still bound by the laws of nature. When brightening shadows in postprocessing you’re only increasing pixel values with complete disregard for reflection, refraction, scattering, etc.
e.g. Speedlite Interior | Larry Lefever Photography
* My “never” and “always” have a 3 year expiry date.
It’s not quite perfect as the bottom right chair has certain problems. Done with Krita with only filter layers. I could import this file as a file layer in Krita and apply LAB adjustment for finalization. The red are overblown.
And finally, with a duplicate of a layer, and converting layer color space from RGB to LAB with color adjustment applied, and make the layer to saturation blending mode, and you get this.
I been looking at these pictures more, and this raise a question. Who has the correct color calibration here? I noticed some looks better and worse in different devices.
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