Doodle Graphics

Inspired this morning by Scott Hanselman's tweet:

Some AMAZING High Dynamic Range photos. These are REAL photos.  http://bit.ly/kParz

I thought I'd give it a go. Limited by flat batteries, and missing the 5 minutes of exciting sunset this evening, I ended up with this image of the picture we bought on holiday last month, that is now hanging in the study. It's a mass produced photo on canvas, but quite nice:

(Click for large version etc.).

I thought I'd also quickly run through the steps I went through on this. I started with three separate photos taken from my camera, each taken manually, at the same focus, aperture and shutter speed, but with three different Exposure Compensations: -2EV, 0EV and +2EV - I went straight for the extremes:

The three exposures: Left to Right: -2EV, 0EV, and +2EV (click for large versions etc.).

I then dropped all three images into one layer in GIMP, in increasing order of exposure. this obviously resulted in the same image as the +2EV one above, however, once I started playing around with the layer modes, interesting things started to happen:

The -2EV base layer, with the 0EV exposure with a layer mode of "Soft Light".

I then set the +2EV layer at the top with a layer mode of "Hard Light", and ended up with the image that started this post, which strangely seems to have more light coming from it than the original picture 

Filed under: Photography