Playing with HDR

 

Spent some time playing around with Aurora HDR 2018 and an image taken from the Yard of the sunlight just kissing some machinery in the RNLI area.

Not that I profess to understand the different sections within the tool or what they do, I simply picked a base preset that I quite liked and then moved sliders around until I got something I liked :-)

Cropped and tidied up in Photoshop to remove some of the bird poop & feathers that inevitably land on everything within the Slip 3 area and below I quite like the final HDR image compared with the original. 

Although I say HDR it is a single image so not true HDR in the normal sense but that doesn't stop you running a single image into these tools and applying some quite unique looks.

And subjects such as this can accept a harsher set of effects than say landscapes or indeed portraits.

It's certainly fired up my interest again, although I'd started off investigating using RAW over JPEG, single image over a bracketed set. The issue with RAW is that the camera settings, in particular noise reduction, isn't baked in as it is with a JPEG. I'd have to use DPP, Canon's proprietary software in order to apply those settings and then save off as a large TIFF file because Lightroom et al cannot apply the equivalent noise reduction because that info isn't shared outside of Canon. All this potential faff makes me think I'm better off sticking to the usual bracketed JPEGs and be done with it. I rarely shoot RAW anyway, most modern cameras deal with high ISOs very well these days and although I don't have a full-frame camera my DSLR and mirrorless produce equally good, reasonably clean images. Plus pixel peeping these days is unnecessary, unless you are going to view your image from a significant distance away you won't even notice the "grain".

So back to the bracketed JPEGs and save myself the aggro, if nothing else I'll keep DPP installed for now as in this testing I've realised that the 77D RAWs can't be read by my old, more simplistic HDR software and the new mirrorless RAWs can't be read by Aurora HDR - so if nothing else it could be useful for conversion purposes... Should I feel the need to shoot RAW at any time.