Office in HDR with pfscalibration [LWN.net]

These sample images are part of the Grumpy Editor's Guide to HDR with Linux.

Original:

HDR with cinepaint:

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Office in HDR with pfscalibration

Posted Mar 16, 2007 21:42 UTC (Fri) by mikov (guest, #33179) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't know anything about photography, so I am commenting purely as a viewer.

Unlike the Boulder foothill images, here the original here looks much better to me. The HDR image does allow to see the detail in the yard through the window, but is all pinkinsh/red and feels somehow fuzzy and unclear. OTOH, it could be a better representation of the natural light in our editor's "dungeon" when the picture was taken (at sunset perhaps ?).

BTW, thanks for this article. I didn't know HDR even existed - in my opinion it definitely makes pictures look much more like the real thing, although there is some adjustment needed since we have been trained by looking at "ordinary" photos for years.

Now, if the same technology could be applied to video ...

Office in HDR with pfscalibration

Posted Mar 20, 2007 2:40 UTC (Tue) by npj (guest, #4267) [Link] (1 responses)

Have to agree with the post above (again very limited knowledge of photography). Essentially the over-bright areas (the window, the screen, the potted plant in front of the window, the left of the desk) are definitely improved in HDR. Equally the over-dark areas (such as the stereo in the corner of the desk) are also improved too. The rest seems sort of washed-out and lifeless. It makes me wonder whether something that applied HDR in full to the over-bright or over-dark areas, but applied it much less to the areas of medium / average / "normal" brightness, might produce a result that had the best aspects of both worlds.

Office in HDR with pfscalibration

Posted Oct 3, 2009 7:00 UTC (Sat) by SirPsychoS (guest, #61126) [Link]

The problem here is the tone mapping method used - and I use the word "problem" loosely, as this method is in a way the most accurate way of reproducing an HDR image. It looks to me like this was just compressed over the range of contrast, so things that look vivid in the mid-range of the original are lower in contrast in the HDR tonemapped image. Other methods produce more interesting results that look much more realistic and much better (in my opinion) than the original. I agree that this particular image looks less appealing than its original, but that is a fault of the display technology, not of HDR in general. Actually, if you want to get technical, the ugliness you're complaining about in the second image is _Low_ Dynamic Contrast--if the same image were displayed on some hypothetical display that could show any color that exists, it would look exactly as good as it does in real life