Tone Mapping

[ArchRival]

Wanted to share the results of a personal project i've been working on for sometime now, off and on. Supposed to be the tone-mapping module for a HDR code. Took awhile to tweak it right, and now i've got something fun to play with :bsmilie::bsmilie:

 

[LeDave]

can you give me step by step on how to do it? And how did oyu manage to get everything else to change except for people. Also is there a way to leave the sky alone without tonemapping it?

 

[ArchRival]

The program does local tone mapping. The little people are probably quite small and already well-contrasted, so not much mapping done on them.

I guess a problem with this picture is the blue sky taken through a polarizing filter. After mapping the sky appears almost black. Probably should not have used a polarizing filter on an image to be tone-mapped.

Anyway, two more tests. The first is a flash drive with a metal shell. Not much texture here, but the fingerprint on the metal is brought out after tone mapping. The second is a pair of excavators with lots of texture.

 

[WuffRuff]

Very nice! I love the effect.
Notice also how the badly overexposed hdb block in the 2nd photo showed all the details after tone-mapping. Tone-mapping can recover lost details to overexposed photos... cool!

Please share how this is done. I would like to learn how to do it too.

 

[ArchRival]

Dude, this was done with a c code. The buildings are not grossly overexposed, else there will be nothing there to recover.

More tests:

For comparison to original: http://i286.photobucket.com/albums/ll89/ArchRival_2008/Photos for Web/WheelBurrow.gif

For comparison to original: http://i286.photobucket.com/albums/ll89/ArchRival_2008/Photos for Web/TombStones.gif

This is probably not a good candidate for tone mapping, since the original already has quite a lot of details.



A problem is posterization in areas with little detail. Need to work on this somemore.

 

[ArchRival]

100% crop of a 1296x1944 image.

 

[LifeInMacro]

Wow, your work (as in the coding of the TM module) is admirable...well, at least we all know now that photographers can write good software programs too!

Most happy to be your beta tester if you need any...

 

[ArchRival]

Did a few improvements to the code.