I was working on an image the other night that I had shot in Red Rock Canyon out near Las Vegas. I spent an afternoon shooting some HDR shots of the scenery and had processed most of them shortly after I had returned home. This particular set of images had somehow escaped my attention so I went ahead and put it through my typical HDR workflow, Lightroom to Photoshop for HDR conversion, HDR file to Photomatix Pro for tonemapping. The only problem is that, for some strange reason, the colors in my image went completely haywire. I had green mountains with turquoise and purple spots in places. I tried hard to correct the image in Photoshop, applying multiple hue and saturation adjustment layers but to no end. The strange thing is that I have another HDR file that was created from almost the same location using the same technique.
Nothing red about those rocks
This led me to check out some other HDR files where I found another shot where large green splotches appeared in the branches of a tree. That would be okay if it were filled with leaves but these were just branches and sky. Just another example of tonemapping gone crazy. I am going to try and process the same files using some alternative software applications to see if they render the same results but for now, I will just chalk this up to being “just one of those things”. What I have learned from this is that it’s always a good idea to shoot more than one set of bracketed images, just in case you get a set that goes bad.
Check out the color blobs living in the branches
Here’s a look at another Red Rocks HDR file that went right.
When things go right it looks more like this
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Hi Jeff.
This is very strange…I’ve certainly never experianced this. Why don’t you skip the Photoshop bit and go straight to Photmatix to generate the HDR file…see if that makes a difference.