NDR: playing with HDR

This is definitely not an underwater shot but I think it provides some food for thought about how this could be applied to UW photography. This is a 9 shot panorama that I did using Photomatix Pro for the HDR conversion and Autopano Pro for the stitching. Please excuse the watermarks as I'm only trialing Photomatix Pro at this time.

Larry -

I've been seeing a lot of HDR work over the last few months, and much of it comes out looking more like a rendered graphic file than a natural scene as your eye might show it. This is a great example of the latter.

That is a lovely image.

I like it. Just like segal3 said: it looks natural.

How do you do HDR panorama? I mean do you first stich say 3 panoramas with diffrent exposusers and than make a HDR or you first make HDRs and than stich them?

This is a 9 shot pano taken with a Nikon D200 and 17-35 f/2.8@ 19mm. I shot in manual mode f11@ 1/10th with a 7 exposure auto bracket. PP workflow:

Convert RAW to TIF with Capture 4.4

Blend the -2 and +2 EV frames with Photomatix Pro

Stitch the 9 blended images with Autopano Pro

Fnal adjustments and resize in Photoshop CS

I spent a lot of time experimenting with the various EV exposures to find the combination that gave the best balance between Shadow/Highlight detail and a realistic appearence. For this image, combining the -2EV and +2EV images gave the best result.