top 5 HDR Mistakes

Top 5 HDR Mistakes 

1.  halos.  This occurs where something dark meets something light in the frame.  Usually, this is where trees meet the sky.  Halos can occasionally be desirable, such as in an HDR photo of a car, but in landscape photos?  No way.  Rookie mistake caused by cranking the gamma and the smoothing.  
2. Grainy skies.   HDR processing is notorious for creating grainy frames, especially in photos of skies.   But how do you eliminate grain?  You need grain reduction software, such as Topas Adjust.  It works very well to eliminate the graininess from HDR photos.
3. Ghosting, or moving artifacts.  Because you are taking numerous shots when you shoot HDR photos, anything that moves between frames will cause ghosting.  This is especially important when shooting photos of people, moving cars, bodies of water,   The way to eliminate ghosting is to use Photoshop to mask out portions of the photo, and to substitute in those same portions from just one frame.  This is time consuming, but it is effective.  Photomatix will do some of this work for you if you select the right option.
4.  Over texturization.  Sometimes you may want this, but other times you don’t.  If you were shooting an HDR photo of an old brick building then you would want the excessive texture.  But if you were shooting your mother’s face, then you want the texture to be as smooth as possible.  HDR brings out the texture in things, and creates more texture than the eye can see in real life.  So watch your processing settings and don’t crank those sliders to much or it will lead to too much texture
5. Fringe colour.   Again, watch those sliders as you process your HDR.  The best look is often the most natural look.