[HDR-photo] glow around objects

[Royce Howland]

Sam Kittner wrote:
> My strength is already pretty low, usually set at 45.
> What would you set the micro smoothing on?

To reduce the blooming or halo effect, you may wish to use a lower 
strength, and/or combine that with setting a higher value for light 
smoothing. I typically use strength of 50 - 70, and light smoothing at 
the maximum.

Details Enhancer may still produce some of these halos however, as a 
side effect of what it is doing... which is enhancing image contrast in 
localized areas of the image while compressing the over-all image 
contrast enough to make the high dynamic range of the source fit into 
the output TIFF or JPEG format. Enhancing local contrast produces these 
halos as a side effect of its operation, and you can't always stop it 
from happening with Details Enhancer settings, given that you want the 
rest of the image to look a certain way. I don't expect most of my tone 
mapped images to be in their final form straight out of Photomatix or 
any other HDR tool. Instead, I plan to do a good degree of finishing 
work in Photoshop, just like I would if I was dealing with a single RAW 
image.

As an example I often use the technique Geraldine mentioned, producing 
both a Details Enhancer and a Tone Compressor version of my image and 
then blending them together in Photoshop. Tone Compressor does not do 
any local contrast enhancements, and therefore does not produce halos. 
Depending on how you choose the layer blending mode and opacity in 
Photoshop, you can get a rich level of local contrast from the Details 
Enhancer image while also smoothing out the areas of continuous tone 
(like sky or calm water) based on the Tone Compressor image.

I often set microcontrast at max (10), and microsmoothing around 5.

Note of course that many of these settings are simply personal taste. 
And because of the nature of Details Enhancer in particular, being 
strongly influenced by the actual tones and tonal range in the source 
file, any given image may need a different treatment to work well on its 
own terms.

Royce Howland
Calgary, Alberta
NatureScapes.Net: http://roycehowland.naturescapes.net/
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vividaspect/