Friday, June 24, 2011

Oloneo HDR

I've been farting around with Oloneo HDR software (full disclosure -- they sent me a complimentary copy; hard to say no to free!) to see how it compares to the other software I use and have used, including Photoshop CS2, CS5, and Photmatix 4. So far, the strengths of Oloneo seem to be in ghost removal (it's been almost perfect at this in most test images I've tried) and in doing a good job of rendering more "photoreaslistic" HDR shots -- i.e., not overcooked. If you've followed me in the past, you know that one of my pet peeves is overdone HDR images that look like something out of a chemically induced Hunter Thompson story. It also has some rather powerful tools (seperate curves for saturation and luminence, for example, with an instantly updating histogram) that make fine tuning an image possible, if you know what you're doing.

Oloneo's weakness currently seems to be that it has no chromatic abberation correction, which is a problem as ultrawide lenses like the ones I use often have a bit of this -- and it gets magnified by HDR photomerges. I tried to get around this by doing the CA removal in Adobe Bridge, saving as TIFF files, and merging the TIFFs, but this resulted in even more (and even weirder) artifacts showing up in the final image. It would seem Oloneo really prefers to ingest RAW files.

Here's a quick comparison I did of an old image that I revisit from time to time whenever I have a new HDR program to play with:

Photoshop CS2 Version:




Photoshop CS5 Version:




Photomatix 4 (then taken into Photoshop for final adjustments):




Oloneo 1.0 (then taken into Photoshop for final adjustments):


Friday, June 17, 2011

Joplin tornado destruction


This is a photo from Joplin, Missouri, May 25, 2011. Joplin was struck by an EF-5 tornado.

Testing a new layout today -- it'll make older posts look a little stupid, but going forward, all images need to be large.