So here is an interesting image. Was taken on the Toronto island along the boardwalk on the south side of the island. The boardwalk backs onto several residences, one of which had this cool gazebo. With the late afternoon sun poking through the trees, I thought a sunburst type image in HDR might make an interesting shot. Though I had a tripod with me, I shot this hand held bracketed 3 images at +/-2EV. Unfortunately, when I got home and looked at the images, the bracketing didn't seem that great as I had these three lacklauster images to work with.
I could still work with it though. The underexposed image would give me the sky, the normal image would give me the sunburst and the overexposed image would give me basically everything else.
Loaded the images into Photomatix and chose one of the painterly presets and ended up with the following image.
Interesting, but a couple of issues. The green flare right in the middle looks horrible which also appears to have caused the trim on the gazebo to turn moldy green. The sky also looks a little fake. There wasn't enough info in the normal and underexposed images to try and recover whatever was under the flare easily so I ended up having to clone the parts where the flare showed up and I ended up repainting the colour of the wood trim on the gazebo. Took me a long time to do it. I also tried to even out the colour of the sky, but wasn't too happy with the result. I ended up cropping the image to make it less distracting. The final image.
Still not too happy about some of the flare, but I already spent so much time on it fixing the one flare in the middle, I just called it a day.
