Accidental HDR?

[Richard Unsworth]

Hi

I was messing around with an image as attached and trying to use other modes/channels to dump the terrible noise on it. 7D at ISO 3200 and dark is not pretty.

At one point I tried 32 bit lol. When I changed back to 16 bit I was surprised to get up an HDR box so hey I gave it a whirl!
Now I am not suggesting the image is good, cos it aint but anyone know why this works or at least procduces an effect?

btw the image is sooo much darker when posted; I have asked why this is so different from my view but got no reply.

[Cheryl Slechta]

Richard, hopefully you'll get an answer - I'm afraid I don't know. I love the birds

[denise ippolito]

Richard, Processing in HDR (high dynamic range)opened up the full dynamic range of the image and that is why you saw a dramatic change. When you convert to a jpeg you are going down to an 8bit file.
As presented I would crop some off the bottom and left. I might tone down the bright branch.

[Douglas Bolt]

I agree with Denise on the crop. And, if you are using PS, I'd suggest increasing the Color Noise Reduction in Bridge to about 50 from the default 25. There is a lot of color noise in the breast feathers. Also, you might try increasing the Luminance Noise Reduction to 50 or even 75. There are other noise reduction plugins that might do a better job than Bridge, but Bridge does a reasonable job if you don't have one of the other programs.

Also, if you have CS6, try increasing the Shadow slider in Bridge to maybe +70. It will do wonders opening up the shadows. Again, many other ways to approach dark shadows, but Bridge is a good start.

[WIlliam Maroldo]

Douglas; are you refering to ACR? Bridge itself doesn't allow editing images, but you can certainly open ACR from it. Also, the version of ACR is important when describing slider actions, ACR6 is quite a bit different than previous versions.
HDR is a technique that allows use of multiple image information to make up for a sensors inability to capture the full dynamic range of a scene, typically shown in high contrast situations. With one image, taken of a scene that has a greater dynamic range than the sensor, it is impossible to capture detail in either the brightest or darkest parts of an image. In post-processing HDR manipulation has nothing to do with actually retrieving this lost information. It simply uses tone mapping to correct the exposure range (lightens the dark areas, darkens the highlights). This makes the image look superficially like the luminosity range you would expect with HDR, but detail that was never captured (due to being outside the dynamic range of the sensor) can not be recovered. regards~Bill