Robert's Ramblings

If you spent six months in this leaky boat you'd be be well fed, have a fantastic water view but the rest of the experience would deteriorate rapidly from there!

The challenge is to work out where it is!

This is my third HDR image and I must admit that it is a lot of fun with endless possibilities for artistic input. This is however my first image with my image workflow under control. It goes something like this.

1. Capture the raw frames and store in my primary workspace.
2. Edit the render settings for the raw images and export them as temporary 16bit tiff input files (discarded later).
3. Process the HDR image and then export both the XMP settings file with the tone mapping details and the HDR output file as a 16bit TIFF back to be stored with the original raw files.
4. Complete any post processing treating the HDR output files as a new raw file.

Basically this process ensures I can recreate verbatim the same processing from raw files to final rendered JPG again in the future so I never ever need to store a range of rendered JPG files. I simply render the JPG files I need when I need them and I can revisit the HDR process if I need using virtual copies of the original raw file in order to distinguish different HDR processing paths. This last point is imported as I may want to use multiple HDR images in a layer stack for more artistic control. Then again maybe I won't.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 130 - Leaky Boat'. 1/(125,640,2500) sec at 40mm f/11, ISO 500 hdr