Landwehr Digital Arts

This Project was and attempt to create a usable "HDR" image from 3 JPEG files. The photographer was shooting HDR brackets for Mercy Hospital interior photography. Somehow the camera was inadvertenly set to shoot JPEG instead of RAW.

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This is an what I had to work with. Below are the 3 brackets with their EV values

mercy-B1-3up-start-760

 Try running these JPEG's through an HDR process. Good Luck. Actually I tried it with Photoshop (Merge to HDR Pro).

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Step 1. Convert each JPEG to TIF.

Step2. Convert each TIF to Lab mode. In LAB I tried to correct to as much of the color as possible. Plus I did a little Shadow / Highlight adjustment on the shadows. The result shows the LAB correction on the middle exposure (EV 0). I applied the same treatment to the other 2 exposures.

mercy-B3-2484-LAB-760.

Step 3. Create a "manual HDR" setup with layers and masks. I tried a few different setups. This one seemed best. I only used 2 of the exposures, the light (EV +2) and middle (EV 0). Although there are still some issues, this got me close. Flatten and save.

mercy-B4-layer-setup-1-760

  Step 4. Another layer set up fo retouching. I applied a luminosity blend, got rid of the red tones with a saturation layer and mask. It is easy to over neutralize images in LAB mode, so I felt I should add back a little warmth with a color mask. Almost there. Flatten and save.

mercy-B5-layer-setup-2-760

Step 5. Clean up the color a little more. Reduce refections and glare. Eliminate some minor flares. Finally the light fixtures on the round columns were blown out, so I pasted in the light fixtures from the darkest exposure (EV -2) and blended them in to get the final version. All that was left was a final clean-up and sharpening.