Colour & HDR

I took this series of photo after spilling a pile of fish oil tables on a place mate and turning them around I noticed the refraction made for very interesting patterns of light and it wasn’t long before I had shaped the pile into the crude outline of a fish (my love of self reference got the better of me here!). I then waited for see what google+’s auto backup and auto awesome might do. Well it was not so exciting in terms of the stop motion (on the left) but the HDR effort (below left) got me think about controlling colour in HDR in general. So I have run a couple of HDR using the picturenaut tools I am familiar with. the results where pretty amazingly different (shown below). Individually they are all fine but the alteration of the colour is as dramatic as the “contrasty “HDR look””. I have always like the idea of stretching the dynamic range of an image, which is what the HDR technique promises, and I have used it to get closer to what I actually remember seeing at the time. The issue that is very clear to me here is stretching the contrast can significantly impact the colour. In any case this is probably one of the examples where HDR has not added to the impact of the photo I actually much prefer the +0.5 EV (slightly over exposed) unaltered JPEG image (above) anyway

Google+ HDR Details of tone mapping approach unknown?	Picturenaut (all defaults)Using Standard Weighting and Photoreceptor tone mapping (aka Reinhard) with 8 bit jpeg output	Picturenaut (my Approach)Using Mid Weighting, Colour Balancing and Adaptive Logarithmic Tone mapping (aka Drago) with 16 bit tiff output and  a few final tonal tweaks in lightroom