Douglas forest and lighting tests

[Dune]

So I made this simple scene with a Douglas forest around a lake. Again, I found the straight PT outcome very dark in the shadows. So I made a HDR version in PS. And tried some different lighting up scenarios. See what you think. Perhaps the Photoshop adjustment is even the easiest.

[Dune]

I can't upload the other one, strange....

[Dune]

I think it works this time.....

[Hannes]

I'd say of your crop renders the ones with the plane and the hemisphere look best. Quite noisy though. And the HDR image looks nice as well, but could use a little more contrast to my taste.
However, if everything else fails, why not using PS?

[Dune]

Btw. the grain (in water especially, but also in mist itself) also bugs me. It's a very shallow (80m) v2 mist layer, with cloud quality at 2, AA=6, robust sampler, but with noise threshold changed from 0.05 to 0.04. Still not good enough, apparently. I have to experiment with that too. The ray detail multiplier was set at 0.5 instead of default 0.25.

I agree, but I hoped to find a fast and less grainy solution. 

[Dune]

Maybe more like this.

[Hannes]

Oh yes, this is nice!!

[pclavett]

Those are great examples Ulco ! Are you saying that you simply HDR the dark output by making several Photoshop versions and then re-import them in HDR PRO ? This may be a stupid question......but I am an amateur at all this language......but am learning !

[Dune]

I saved at 16-bits tiff and just did a (image adjust hdr toning) adjustment within PS, but without the saturation increase, and bent the curve a bit down in the leftish darker section to have it not too light.

[Matt]

Again, I found the straight PT outcome very dark in the shadows.

Why not increase the exposure?

(Ducks and hides...)

[Dune]

Are you a hunter?    ducks and hides

I'll see if the sky won't burn out then....

[Hannes]

Are you a hunter?    ducks and hides

I'll see if the sky won't burn out then....

That's it! Come on, Matt! Let's cheat a bit! 


(Ducks and hides as well) 

[Matt]

 

[pclavett]

Again, I found the straight PT outcome very dark in the shadows.

Why not increase the exposure?

(Ducks and hides...)

It could not be that simple ...... right ? Mind you, you could do several renders with different exposures and do the HDR trick I guess, that could take care of the burned sky ! You multiply render times but, heck what else can you have a computer do when you sleep ! I tried in Photoshop yesterday with taking the render, overdoing the shadows booster in incremental doses, making 3 versions and importing in HDR PRO module and it kept asking me for the EV exposure values before it would import them.....at some point I put in some arbitrary values and got something that was really nasty for an HDR image. Ulco showed us a decent HDR trial higher up in the thread.....hope he can give us details on that.....looked pretty good. If you do want to do several exposures.....is there a value that will translate the exposure value for the camera into EV values, Photoshop seems to insist on getting those before it processes the pictures, usually gets it automatically from the camera metadata embedded in the pictures.

[Matt]

"Light exposure" 0.125 => EV -3
"Light exposure" 0.25 => EV -2
"Light exposure" 0.5 => EV -1
"Light exposure" 1 => EV 0
"Light exposure" 2 => EV +1
"Light exposure" 4 => EV +2
"Light exposure" 8 => EV +3

and so on.

However, if you work with EXRs then you only need to render once, and bypass all that stuff.