HDR Valentine

Today I have been through quite a few frustrations in my first attempt to create an HDR photo. I've seen some really amazing HDR photos online, and thought it would be interesting to try it out myself since I have the technology available. As always I got to excited, opened too many things, and ended up having PS freeze and shut down saving none of the work I had spent most of the day learning.

After finally restarting the computer and the program I had to redo most of the work I had already done. In a general sense, this is good because I get more practice trying to make the new information stick. But it was still frustrating. Once I was finished I was ready to upload and blog.

Here is where things got really frustrating. After spending so much time just getting the files to work properly I upload my photo ready to blog. Now blogspot has a deal with picasa, and considering the fact that I already use picasa web albums, this was a happy revelation for me (no more new photos sites to log into and remember username/password for!). Tada photo... look, look, look.. WHAT! I work so hard on the definition in an HDR image and picasa is going to compress my already compressed photo! You have got to be joking me. The above image is from my flickr account. The image below is from my picasa account. Now I am being a bit OCD about the definition in this pretty unexciting picture. But I worked very hard to make that wrapper actually look like a wrapper, instead of blown out flat plastic. So I believe I have every right to rant about it.

So now I will apologize because I may be going back and forth between my flickr account and my picasa account while posting photos in this blog (until I figure out some other alternative). Here is my photo for today. It really isn't exciting, except for the fact that it is probably the most detailed picture I've been able to come out with in a long time. Feel free to leave any comments. I know that it isn't anything fantastic, but it was fun to learn the technique:) Enjoy and Happy Valentines day!