Half Dome Fantasy

[compilerbitch]

Half Dome Fantasy, originally uploaded by M0n0chrom3.

I've had this image sitting on my hard drive since my trip to Yosemite last summer. I never quite managed to render it in a way that I liked because it had too much dynamic range, but I recently experimented with the HDR tonemapping feature of CS2 (that I didn't know existed until recently). Basically, I loaded the 14-bit raw version of the image into CS2, changed bit depth to 32, then back again to 16, and the tonemapping dialogue appeared. A bit of fiddling later, and some minor dodging and burning and hey presto. :-)

I'm going to experiment a bit more with HDR techniques and probably write an essay on it when I have some interesting results, but so far I'm impressed with the possibilities. Not many people seem to do HDR black & white, but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work.

Comments

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

That looks quite wonderful.

You might be interested in Greg Ward's HDR papers & book. (His HDR software is good, too, but you need a Mac. And he pretty much invented HDR simulation rendering back when.) Paul Debevec's HDR Parthenon reconstruction is quite cool, too, though it's more SIGGRAPH cool than really good. And these people, who have just been bought by Dolby have an honest-to-god HDR display.