mmhnemo wrote:Well, referring to the 2 pictures showing the inside of a church I perceive the 2nd image as magnitudes better considering the tonal range. Just comparing the wood representations in both shots or the shadow areas leaves me no doubt the 'eye realism', as it was called, is the superior.
It is a matter of personal preference in the end.
But if your eyes can't expose such a huge range as that 2nd picture shows in a glimpse. Maybe if you stand and look around for a minute at all the areas in the image, and then remember what it looked like, then that is it.
When you walk outside from seeing a film at the cinema the sky hurts your eyes as the eye reduces it's light intake. Now if you look back where you just came from, it is dark.
Another good example, light at the end of the tunnel. As you leave the tunnel your eye adapts and you see detail. 200 metres back in the tunnel and it's just a blob of white light with a bloom around it, even with a well focussed eye.
Indeed the fact the eye builds up an image from lots of small pickup points or exposures means you can't really compare it to a digital image anyway, or an image a camera exposes.
The eye has no focus point when you see something like the image used, everything you would 'notice' is in focus when you do so. The depth of field is constantly varying as your eye opens up and closes down to balance the light it takes in to resolve the incoming light to the eyes sensitivity range.
Look at any flattened HDRI image, they look un-natural, the dynamic range is squashed. What is *really* twice as bright, and the eye would notice as twice as bright, may actually only be displayed on a screen as maybe 10% brighter, because the range is compressed.
Compressed dynamic range images don't show anything realistic at all. They are un-natural and 'lossy'
Now if you had a monitor that could output HDR ranges then great, but even then your eye would then pick the range of values it wanted to optimise for, ie, anything too bright would white out if you looked into the shadows, and looking into the sky say, would black out the shadow detail.
They eye can't see a wide range all at once.
Fair enough to make a flattened range image, but they are far from natural. Personally I think a decent picture of a real life scene often brings out more beauty and interesting shadow/light, than an artificial image which can't capture a certain aspect.
But yes, personal preference. But all the best photographers out there don't go bracketing all their shots and making flattened HDRi's to make their images look better.
For stylish stuff they can look interesting, but that church looks so much nicer with blown out highlights and some depth to the shadows, rather than not much depth anywhere (imho)
Dave
- By jurX