Budapest Bridge at night

[Hazel Grant]

I decided to experiment with tone mapping and thought of this shot I took of a bridge in Budapest. Since it's my first attempt at this mapping, I'd appreciate any input. Thanks. 1/4 sec. F4.8. Iso 200. no flash
(I know 200 is not a good night setting but missed changing it when I took the photo.)

[Jerry van Dijk]

Hi Hazel, this looks like it has the potential for quite an interesting HDR, but needs some additional work IMHO. I like the diagonal of the bridge leading the eye to the cathedral. I would start with removing noise before merging the images, HDR has a tendency to exaggerate the noise. Comp. wise I think the image needs a little CCW rotation. I also wish that the top of the cathedral wasn't touching the edge of the frame.
I'm not a HDR expert, so hopefully the others chime in. It might be helpful to provide some more information about the HDR/tonemapping process you applied. For instance, how many images did you blend with which exposures, is it a true HDR or pseudo HDR from the same RAW image, which software did you use and which settings?

[Hazel Grant]

Pseudo HDR using photoshop from a tutorial. I saw the noise but wasn't sure what to do about it. I'll remove it first before merging next time. I know it's still a learning process. thanks.

[Morkel Erasmus]

Hazel this looks like an interesting scene. I can't say I am a fan of what you did to the image during processing :e3...the grain looks almost as if it was applied deliberately to simulate "rippled water"?
Sorry about being so frank.
Would you mind posting a JPG conversion of the original RAW file? It's hard for me to really critique any further without knowing what you started from? :t3

[Robert Amoruso]

I agree with the above comments.

[Matt Fragale]

I like the concept of this one. It is a bit too noisy as is, but I would love to see the original. I assume it is fairly underexposed? Maybe you could blur it and convert it to black and white and go crazy with the grain to give it that old timey, foggy feel?