I don’t know about you guys, but the photo viewing software of my choice is Google’s free “Picasa”. In the latest update there were several new effects added to the library, on of them being “HDR-ish” (example below):
Does anyone know how I could achieve this effect in the compositor?
The original is more HDR than the “HDR-ish”. I did a lot of HDR. If you wanna achieve the right image look try and raise saturation, contrast via compositor. Mix with some kind of negative glow. Take that only as a starting point but not as a guaranteed recipe.
Wish you good luck!
That “HDR-ish” effect looks more like a bad case of Unsharp Mask overdose. To imitate it, you’ll likely have to do a lot of experimentation in the Compositor, trying out various filters and compositing settings. There is no standard filter node for something like that.
an HDR image i basically the union of 3 images:
you can fake the same thing with every 3D rendering engine and tune the exposure, render those 3 images an merge them together with a program capable to generate HDR images, or you can fake this tuning hight lights and shadows directly in blender.
Thanks very much! I’ll have to try them.
The HDR-ish example you give does not look like HDR at all and it’s unbearably awful.
Combining 3 different exposures in the compositor is the way to go.
Yea, I’ve been having some issues. Is there any way to simulate the three different types of exposures from already taken footage? (that may be a dumb question, but you know, I’ve always been told “there’s no such thing as a dumb question”)(I’m talking about footage taken from a camera, not in blender, by the way)
You won’t be able to use the three-exposure technique (which only describes the barest minimum of HDR image-making ingredients, btw) to create this because it is not anywhere close to actual HDR imagery. It’s a heavily-applied filter with a misleading name.
My approach would be to use brightness and contrast to create a channel that is reduced to nearly posterized values, then experiment with Color nodes in various ways (Add, Subtract, Multiply, Exclusion, Difference, etc.) to recombine this with the original image. You can generate various masks with the images as well, which may help achieve the final. But it’s not something that will be done with a simple recombination of a few processed images.
To give you an idea of how complex node-work can get for special visual effects, take a look at the second part of my Kata video (link in my sig, still frame attached), where the dancer takes on her glowing spirit-form. The look of that figure, plus that of the shadow-dancer creatures she fights, took over 100 nodes operating simultaneously, distributed between various render layers, filters, masks, color processing noes, and final compositing nodes. Your project probably won’t be that complicated, but it does show that complex effects require complex node design.
