A Different GDR Tool

On Thu, 5 Mar 2015 00:09:09 -0800, Savageduck
wrote:

On 2015-03-05 07:54:02 +0000, Eric Stevens said:

On Wed, 4 Mar 2015 21:23:54 -0800, Savageduck
wrote:

On 2015-03-05 03:14:16 +0000, Bill W said:

On Wed, 4 Mar 2015 18:27:26 -0800, Savageduck
wrote:

HDR express sounds just what I need and I will be interested in
hearing whether or not you go ahead and buy it.

I have pretty much decided to pull the trigger and buy this one.

The price is right. I might buy it just on your review of it here.

I tried one more challenging test; a 5 shot exposure bracket set which
had to deal with moving waves. I think it did pretty well.

One of the interesting things with using the HDR Express 3 LR plug-in
is all rendering done in the plug-in on unadjusted RAW, or DNG files is
32-bit. All other adjustments are made once the TIFF has been saved
back to LR, or PS.

Anyway, here is that wave-ghost test.
https://db.tt/abF05aN4

I'm reluctant to say

No you aren't. If you truly were reluctant to say, you wouldn't have.

I don't like being the bearer of bad tidings.

that that one has peculiar HDR appearance.

Perhaps. That is what it is after all.

But why should the appearance of images generated by HDR be so
peculiarly different from the images created by a camera? I've never
understood that.

Maybe the rocks really do have a granulated appearance.
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens

On Thu, 5 Mar 2015 06:25:46 -0800, Savageduck
wrote:

--- snip ---

Here is a DB folder with the unmolested DNG I worked on and the tone
mapped result:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/uenn27hu1srt7yn/AABsY2MQJriy_0b3agEQPb7Xa?dl=0
or
http://tinyurl.com/mrsajcx

That's nice.

How did you support the camera?
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens

On 2015-03-05 21:27:33 +0000, Eric Stevens said:

On Thu, 5 Mar 2015 06:25:46 -0800, Savageduck
wrote:

--- snip ---

Here is a DB folder with the unmolested DNG I worked on and the tone
mapped result:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/uenn27hu1srt7yn/AABsY2MQJriy_0b3agEQPb7Xa?dl=0
or
http://tinyurl.com/mrsajcx

That's nice.

How did you support the camera?

With my meager pension.

So far all of the shots I have provided in this thread have been hand held.

--
Regards,

Savageduck

On Thu, 5 Mar 2015 14:00:00 -0800, Savageduck
wrote:

On 2015-03-05 21:27:33 +0000, Eric Stevens said:

On Thu, 5 Mar 2015 06:25:46 -0800, Savageduck
wrote:

--- snip ---

Here is a DB folder with the unmolested DNG I worked on and the tone
mapped result:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/uenn27hu1srt7yn/AABsY2MQJriy_0b3agEQPb7Xa?dl=0
or
http://tinyurl.com/mrsajcx

That's nice.

How did you support the camera?

With my meager pension.

I thought you took a second job at night.

So far all of the shots I have provided in this thread have been hand held.

So HDR Express makes a good job of lining up images too. A very good
job in fact.
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens

On 2015-03-06 01:47:42 +0000, Eric Stevens said:

On Thu, 5 Mar 2015 14:00:00 -0800, Savageduck
wrote:

On 2015-03-05 21:27:33 +0000, Eric Stevens said:

On Thu, 5 Mar 2015 06:25:46 -0800, Savageduck
wrote:

--- snip ---

Here is a DB folder with the unmolested DNG I worked on and the tone
mapped result:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/uenn27hu1srt7yn/AABsY2MQJriy_0b3agEQPb7Xa?dl=0
or
http://tinyurl.com/mrsajcx

That's nice.

How did you support the camera?

With my meager pension.

I thought you took a second job at night.

Actually retiring as a Lieutenant from a California State Law
enforcement agency gives me a very reasonable pension. Additionally I
bought 5 years of service credit using $122K from my 457K tax
deferred-compensation retirement plan. That more than compensates for
anything a second job might provide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/457_plan

So far all of the shots I have provided in this thread have been hand held.

So HDR Express makes a good job of lining up images too. A very good
job in fact.

It uses two different methods one automatic, and one manual for those
times the auto doesn't fix alignment or ghosts. I had to use the manual
method of selecting a "key" image from the exposure set, with several
examples shown in this thread.
As I said, take a look at the videos.

--
Regards,

Savageduck

On 3/4/2015 2:25 PM, Savageduck wrote:
In the April edition of Photoshop User magazine, which was focused on an
editorial theme I am not particularly intrested in, wedding photography,
I found in the "Product Review" section, a review on Unified Color's
"HDR Express 3".
HDR Express 3 is a trimmed version of their top of the line "HDR Expose
3" and the review was enough to bait me into visiting their web site.

To cut to the chase, I have dowloaded the 30 day trial. It installs as a
stand-alone, and PS, & LR plug-ins. I have run a few tests of some old 5
exposure bracket sets, and I am impressed.
I deliberately picked sets which had major ghosting issues due to
movement of people in the background. This was an issue neither NIK HDR
Efex Pro 2, nor PS HDR Pro have not been able to solve completely. HDR
Express dealt with the ghost movement & image alignment easily.

Then for those not favoring the surreal look of much HDR rendering this
seems to aim at producing realistically rendered images, and does so
quite succesfully.

They have a fair number of video tutorials available and I think this is
going to be my future go-to HDR tool

Just as another image processing tool to play with, give the trial a test.
http://www.unifiedcolor.com/products/hdr-express-3

Here is the result for my set with the ghosting problem, shared with
Adobe CC & DB sharing;
http://adobe.ly/18kdrTj
https://db.tt/SveGaRIl


Thanks for that info. I will be giving it a try. (Only if it works on
Windows.)

--
PeterN

On 2015-03-07 00:29:12 +0000, PeterN said:

On 3/4/2015 2:25 PM, Savageduck wrote:
In the April edition of Photoshop User magazine, which was focused on an
editorial theme I am not particularly intrested in, wedding photography,
I found in the "Product Review" section, a review on Unified Color's
"HDR Express 3".
HDR Express 3 is a trimmed version of their top of the line "HDR Expose
3" and the review was enough to bait me into visiting their web site.

To cut to the chase, I have dowloaded the 30 day trial. It installs as a
stand-alone, and PS, & LR plug-ins. I have run a few tests of some old 5
exposure bracket sets, and I am impressed.
I deliberately picked sets which had major ghosting issues due to
movement of people in the background. This was an issue neither NIK HDR
Efex Pro 2, nor PS HDR Pro have not been able to solve completely. HDR
Express dealt with the ghost movement & image alignment easily.

Then for those not favoring the surreal look of much HDR rendering this
seems to aim at producing realistically rendered images, and does so
quite succesfully.

They have a fair number of video tutorials available and I think this is
going to be my future go-to HDR tool

Just as another image processing tool to play with, give the trial a test.
http://www.unifiedcolor.com/products/hdr-express-3

Here is the result for my set with the ghosting problem, shared with
Adobe CC & DB sharing;
http://adobe.ly/18kdrTj
https://db.tt/SveGaRIl


Thanks for that info. I will be giving it a try. (Only if it works on Windows.)

It does, Windows & OSX. There is no harm in testing the 30-day trial.
That said, take a look at the videos from thier website. That will
bring you up to speed quicker and you won't make some of the
assumptions I did by diving straight in.
Just to clarify, it is a stand-alone and LR plug-in. there is no PS
plug-in. It is easy enough to access PS via LR. For now I find going
the LR route the best fit for my workflow.

An important caveat is to use RAW or unadjusted DNG files to gain the
full benefit of 32-bit HDR processing. JPEGs will work with HDR Express
3, but you are stuck in 8-bit mode with less satisfying results.
--
Regards,

Savageduck

On 3/4/2015 10:14 PM, Bill W wrote:
On Wed, 4 Mar 2015 18:27:26 -0800, Savageduck
wrote:

HDR express sounds just what I need and I will be interested in
hearing whether or not you go ahead and buy it.

I have pretty much decided to pull the trigger and buy this one.

The price is right. I might buy it just on your review of it here.


I have a lot of respect for the Duck, as well as others here. His
favorable review tells me that it's a serious product. But the real
queston for me is how will it fit into my workflow, and will it work for
me.
That is why I will give it a fair trial.

--
PeterN

On Fri, 06 Mar 2015 20:32:27 -0500, PeterN
wrote:

On 3/4/2015 10:14 PM, Bill W wrote:
On Wed, 4 Mar 2015 18:27:26 -0800, Savageduck
wrote:

HDR express sounds just what I need and I will be interested in
hearing whether or not you go ahead and buy it.

I have pretty much decided to pull the trigger and buy this one.

The price is right. I might buy it just on your review of it here.


I have a lot of respect for the Duck, as well as others here. His
favorable review tells me that it's a serious product. But the real
queston for me is how will it fit into my workflow, and will it work for
me.
That is why I will give it a fair trial.

Fortunately for me, I have no workflow. I do have a hobbyflow, but
even that's in disarray.

On 2015-03-07 03:08:42 +0000, Tony Cooper said:

On Fri, 6 Mar 2015 16:49:44 -0800, Savageduck
wrote:

On 2015-03-07 00:29:12 +0000, PeterN said:

On 3/4/2015 2:25 PM, Savageduck wrote:
In the April edition of Photoshop User magazine, which was focused on an
editorial theme I am not particularly intrested in, wedding photography,
I found in the "Product Review" section, a review on Unified Color's
"HDR Express 3".
HDR Express 3 is a trimmed version of their top of the line "HDR Expose
3" and the review was enough to bait me into visiting their web site.

To cut to the chase, I have dowloaded the 30 day trial. It installs as a
stand-alone, and PS, & LR plug-ins. I have run a few tests of some old 5
exposure bracket sets, and I am impressed.
I deliberately picked sets which had major ghosting issues due to
movement of people in the background. This was an issue neither NIK HDR
Efex Pro 2, nor PS HDR Pro have not been able to solve completely. HDR
Express dealt with the ghost movement & image alignment easily.

Then for those not favoring the surreal look of much HDR rendering this
seems to aim at producing realistically rendered images, and does so
quite succesfully.

They have a fair number of video tutorials available and I think this is
going to be my future go-to HDR tool

Just as another image processing tool to play with, give the trial a test.
http://www.unifiedcolor.com/products/hdr-express-3

While the program doesn't interest me personally, is it worth $79?
That much better?

If you are actually doing this sort of thing and are looking for, dare
I say it, a degree of subtlety then it could be considered worth it.
Particularly for those folks who haven't bought the NIK collection, or
might be prepared to shell out $99 for Photomatix Pro 5, which is one
of the programs widely used for HDR, and tends to produce the sort of
HDR images you don't particularly like.
Even the 32-bit HDR rendering with HDR Pro + ACR which is part of PS is
iffy when it comes to dealing with artifacts and ghosts, and can &
does produce some of the haloed saturation none of us are too fond of.

I know you say you are reluctant to even look at an HDR image, but just
this once, break your rule and let me know what you think of this one.
I actually think HDR Express 3 has a lot of promis, and I will probably
spend that $79.
http://adobe.ly/18kdrTj
https://db.tt/SveGaRIl

--
Regards,

Savageduck