First Attempt at HDR

mcavotim

Tell me what you think. Good, bad, or indifferent.
Used "Photomatix" for tone mapping. Still learning what each setting does.

Guy Bell

It's kind of a waste of HDR. The best time to use an hdr image is when your scene includes a reflective object and the sky or room is reflected on that image.

Guy Bell

I built this a few years ago and used an hdr for background and lighting. You have to run a few tests to get your lighting right.

Arden Canelo

Could you explain a little more (or a lot) for those of us that have no idea what you used to do this with? It looks impressive, but I don't know what I'm looking at besides High Def Rendering.

Mentis

The OPs HDR means "High Dynamic Range", it's a photography technique. Wiki it, there's lots of cool stuff done.

I'm not sure what the 2nd poster is talking about.

In regards to the OP: I think you are overdoing it a bit in that shot, you've kind of got the Halos going on.

Guy Bell

Arden Canelo wrote: »

Could you explain a little more (or a lot) for those of us that have no idea what you used to do this with? It looks impressive, but I don't know what I'm looking at besides High Def Rendering.

Sorry, I completely misunderstood this post. I thought the original post was using an HDR image when in fact he was creating one. It looks better than many of the ones that I used in 3D.
To answer your question, the ipod was built from scratch in Blender 3d, given a metallic texture and an HDR image was used as the light source so the "metal" could reflect the photo of the room.

Wrench N Rockets

Ok, first thing's first. The instant you tonemap or otherwise 'flatten' or clamp an HDR image, it ceases to be a high dynamic range image. What you are really trying to do is simulate a large dynamic range in a low dynamic range image.

With that said-

The purpose of a tone mapped HDR is to produce an image that could not be created with a single camera exposure and to create an image that is more true to what your eye see than what is captured on film. What this means is that the human eye has a bigger exposure latitude than a camera: where a camera would only record black with detailed high lights, your eye would be able to see the highs, AND still see some detail in the shadows.

Your goal there for is an image that has lots of shadow detail and yet doesn't have any part that is blown out or over exposed. A building exterior is not a good use for this because you really aren't losing anything in the shadows. What you want is a location where you have very different lighting conditions- think inside your apartment looking out a window. To have the inside of the room be correctly exposed, the world outside the window will be blown out, expose for the outside, and the room will be dark. Your goal is to have an image where noting is over or under exposed and everything looks NATURAL.

Natural is the key work here. It should look like your eye sees it, not like some over-processed cell phone image.

For reference, 90% of the HDR images on Flickr are what NOT to do.