Archive for the 'lightroom' Category
HDR in Lightroom
LR/Enfuse is a HDR plug-in for Lightroom for merging your HDR pictures without leaving LR. You just select the images and tell Enfuse to merge them and import the result back to LR. Couldn’t be simpler! I wish I’d known about this plug-in a few months ago when I was doing comparative tests with HDR software. This little snippet of programming can do the job much better than Photomatix, so I’ve re-done many of the Photomatix HDR’s that I wasn’t happy with and LR/Enfuse came up with a winner every time.
LR/Enfuse doesn’t have as many settings as Photomatix does and the HDRs lack much of the “pop” that Photomatix creates so at first look it may seem like Enfuse isn’t that good. However, what really matters is how the dynamic range is handled and this is where Enfuse shines and you create that pop yourself, it’s no different than any post-processing you with your images. I’ll much rather have a perfect “raw HDR” that needs post-processing than a half-baked HDR with generous contrast and saturation. LR/Enfuse even succeeded with the reflection images that Photomatix completely messed up.
The first image above is Njupeskär, a 4-image HDR. Compare it to the Photomatix HDR, where the sky looks like it belongs to a different image. The second image comprises of 3 exposures, where the Photomatix HDR left a nasty grad filter effect in the birch. Both of these new HDRs are done with the default settings in LR/Enfuse and required post-processing in LR, but nothing extravagant – saturation and curves for the most, and a grad filter in the second image to add some more drama in the clouds.
The trial version has a size limit which I think is way to small (500 pixels) for any reliable evaluation, for example, it’s impossible to say how the alignment works. So after some hesitation I paid to get the full version and now that I know how well it works, I only wish I could get my money back from HDRsoft so I could give them to Timothy Armes instead. If you’re a Lightroom user and looking for HDR software, I can warmly recommend LR/Enfuse!
4 commentsTractor
It was such a great weekend, you’d almost be fooled into thinking it’s summer (if it weren’t for the fact that the temperature stayed in the ‘teens). Perfect for motorbiking, in other words!
Despite the bike, I’m not really a motor enthusiast. Actually, I’m not even a motorbike enthusiast – I just have my Tricker and that’s perfectly enough for me. But this old tractor, it was just begging to be photographed so I parked my bike and obliged.
And then afterwards, I fiddled with just about every slider in Lightroom to edit the life out of it!
1 commentBog star
The bog star, or grass of parnassus (Parnassia palustris) is a flower that definitely deserves a closer look. It’s not hard to find if you are in an area where it grows (bogs, as hinted by the name) because it’s just about the only flower that is still in bloom this late in the season. The first time I remember I ever saw it, was in September a few years back. Now in early August, they have just started blooming and I could still see plenty of buds today.
The bog star is exquisitely beautiful, an absolute delight to see through the macro lens. The pattern in the petals is unrivalled and you’ll find to your surprise that this white flower is much more colourful than you’d expect at first look. Even the leaves are beautiful, as reflected in the Swedish name “hjärtblad” (heart leaf) as this flower is sometimes called here.
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The image is completely (well, almost completely) processed in Lightroom for web release, meaning that LR is increasingly becoming my one-stop-shop for all image processing. I tried the option to add a copyright watermark via the LR export dialog, but it’s not possible to change the font and I found the default style horrible. After some searching I found a plug-in that can insert a graphical watermark during the export process so I can now use my old copyright text, straight from Lightroom. The only thing I’m not happy with is that LR doesn’t seem to compress the jpg’s the same way as e.g. Photoshop does, so the file size is bigger than it should be. If I take down the quality, then the image just gets pixelated. So the “almost completely” I mentioned is that I export the image to Irfanview and just simply save it with a quality setting that gives me the right size without completely messing up the image. A couple of quick clicks and it’s done – and I’m waiting for better compression in Lightroom 3, maybe?
5 comments