Heath OFeeThis weekend I’ve been on call for work which means I have to come into the office for a few hours each day. Since I was already going to be downtown I figured I might as well pack along my camera gear and go out for a morning photowalk each day to practice my HDR photography. Yesterday I got out for just over an hour before I had to head back to the office to finish up, but managed to walk from my office (the Suncor Energy Centre) to Prince’s Island Park and back taking photos all along the way. My travels took me past the new Jamieson Place building which is still under construction. The hanging sculptures just outside the entrance and in the lobby are pretty amazing so I stopped to take a few shots. I processed a few of the images from my walk last night and this one of Jamieson Place was one of my favorites.
This is a 3 shot HDR (-2, 0, +2) processed in Photomatix with some small adjustments in Lightroom.
Let me know what you think of the processing…it might be a bit heavy but I think I like the effect. Also, this photo has a bit too much noise for my liking but the noise reduction algorithms in Lightroom don’t seem to be very powerful. Does anyone know if Photoshop is better for this?? Or should I just suck it up and get myself a copy of NoiseWare??
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4781942/Noiseware_Professional_Edition_2.5.1_%5BENG%5D_%5BPORTABLE%5D
There you go.. Theres a portable copy of Noiseware… That’s a dope picture but its pretty busy in the noise department… Sick though….
Despite the noise it’s a sweet picture. I love these shots where there are many different layers of reflections — foreground glass all the way to the reflections in the glass doors in the back. The colors tend to be great in these also.
I don’t find Lightroom’s noise reduction worth much at all. I bit the bullet and got Noiseware and I find it to do an amazing job…worth every penny (I used Trey Ratcliff’s discount code). Other software packages might be great too but I didn’t try any others.
Thanks for the feedback and the Noiseware recommendation! I think that’ll be the next piece of software I pick up for sure.
This may end up being obvious to you if you buy Noiseware, but I’ll mention that it does such a good job with noise that I occasionally mask some non-noise-reduced areas back in via photoshop to keep some texture or maximize sharpness. Depends what look I want in each part of the image.
Thanks for the tip, Michael. Can’t believe it does such a good job that you actually mask back in some of the original noise…very cool.