[HDR-photo] Why does the preview look better than the finaloutput image?

[Geraldine Joffre]

On Thu, 29 Mar 2007 19:03:07 +0100, Gabbygall wrote
> Hi Geraldine,
> That's all well and good, but its still incredibly annoying, and 
> unless I resize quite a lot (I shoot with a 12mp sensor) then it 
> doesn't look like the preview at all. 
You mentioned in your first post that you are creating the tonemapped image
from a single RAW. I would suggest to try with a "real" HDR image instead,
i.e. created from RAWs taken under several exposures that cover the dynamic
range of the scene. 

Since the final output does not look like the preview at all in your case,
this is likely due to the problem I mentioned earlier when there is a large
number of abnormally low pixel values (at zero or near zero) in the pseudo-HDR
image. Adding an exposure that properly exposes the shadows of the scene may
be sufficient to get rid of the invalid low values once the exposures have
been merged into HDR, and to ensure a final result that will be close to the
preview.

Geraldine Joffre