I happened to stop in at the Forks Road Pottery in Grimsby, Ontario to see what might be there to shoot and while chatting with one of the owners, noticed their resident dog comfortably ensconced on its favourite chair. I was introduced to Traxx a gentle, approximately ten-year-old Border Collie (cross?). The setting, with the chair’s fabrics and the surroundings in general, was just too good to pass up and Traxx was not moving much. I set up the camera on a tripod and proceeded to get this image. Traxx was being a very good dog for me, and made this relatively easy to shoot, although the post-processing was a bit tougher than most to get the best out the image and the dog. Good boy, Traxx! And thanks. – JW
Tech Details:
This is a hybrid HDR image. It was produced by creating a classic three-bracketed-image HDR and combining in post-processing, the resulting HDR image with elements of a tone-mapped version of the base image used in the HDR by itself as well as the original base image from the three-image-bracketed set. Hence the designation ‘HDR/Hybrid’ in the title area.
The three-image set was produced using a tripod-mounted Nikon D7100 fitted with a Nikkor 12-24mm lense set to 14mm, ISO100, Aperture priority mode, f/5.0, auto-bracketed set of three images spaced at EV+/-2 around a base exposure of 1 second. HDR processing was performed using free Open Source software Luminance/Qtpfsgui using the Fattal model at default settings to get a natural-look empahsizing colours, for both the true HDR image and the single-image, tone-mapped version of the base image for the sequence. PP in free Open Source GIMP: loaded the HDR version as the top layer and the tone-mapped (TM) version as the lower layer, used a large soft-edged eraser tool to remove the motion-blurred face areas of the dog to reveal the sharper areas from the TM layer, similarly deleted the motion-blurred staff member’s jeans from the upper right, also deleted some elements from the background in the upper left to revel better versions from the TM layer below, created new working layer from visible results, loaded the original EV+0 image from the bracketed set as the bottom layer and using a large soft-edged eraser tool removed the white areas of the dog’s muzzle from the working layer to reveal the better-looking areas from the EV+0 layer, created new working layer from the visible results, did local red-channel desaturation on the red knob on the wood stove as well as the overly-saturated reds on a few letters of the sign behind the chair (left edge), dodged the white s of the dog’s eye to crisp them up a bit, sharpened, added fine black and white frame, added bar and text on left, scaled to 1800 wide for posting.
Date Taken: 2013-11-13
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D7A_8690_grimforksrdpotterytraxxdog3xHDRmlayevp0TMadjbarsigx1800_pregamma_0.9_fattal_alpha_1_beta_0.9_saturation_1_noiseredux_0_fftsolver_1
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Luminance HDR 2.3.0 tonemapping parameters:
Operator: Fattal
Parameters:
Alpha: 1
Beta: 0.9
Color Saturation: 1
Noise Reduction: 0
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PreGamma: 0.9
