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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.
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Jeff,
You probably couldn’t do that if you tried! I’ve just started to get into HDR and have found it very addictive, I want to do more and more. I’ve managed to collect a few presets from different websites, which I use as starting points. Would you or anyone else be willing to share their settings? For example, in your first photo that went bad, the tonal values in the foreground is a combination I’ve not been able to create. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Of course I meant Photomatrix settings, sorry for not including that piece.
Hi Jeff. O got something like that when I first tried your technique of combining images in Photoshop and then tone mapping in Photmatix. Haven’t been able to recreate it though. I did like your explanation of why you do it that way.
That is really strange. I use the same basic work flow for my HDR (Merge in PS CS3 -> Tone Map in Photomatix -> Tweak in PS CS3) and haven’t experienced this yet. I am assuming the splotches showed up just from the Merge without any tone mapping… is that correct? I know that in some 3D rendering programs when making HDR backgrounds and such (mainly sky) you can get spots and splotches if the gamma isn’t set just right… but in this case the gamma doesn’t come into play until after the merge when you’re tone mapping. So I don’t think that would be the culprit (unless of course I assume incorrectly and the splotches appear during tone mapping).
As for the idea above about doing the merge in Photomatix rather than in PS, I have always preferred the merge tool in PS over the Photomatix merge. It seems to align the images better which is gold for me since I shoot without a tripod a lot more than I should. It really helped to keep the ghosting down when I was merging 3 shots of a sailboat on the river together (though I still got some ghosting it wasn’t bad at all) and also a building that had flags blowing in the wind. Don’t mean to plug my blog but this is what I am speaking of: http://www.tkrphoto.com/archives/64.
Anyway… yeah, very strange on the colors going crazy. Maybe you took the shots right when the aliens from Area 51 started to abduct you and they are a result of the super abductor tractor beam…