The power of HDR – House of Parliament

From my trip to London post I had an HDR picture of the House of Parliament at night.  Without the power of HDR I would never have been able to capture the beauty that my eyes saw in a photograph.

I took a series of 6 bracketed shots merge them together (using Photomatix), did some minor tweaks in Lightroom and Photoshop and came up with the final image.

Here is the 4th bracketed shot (middle of the range) straight from the camera:

As you can see even with the bridge being so dark there are still parts of the photo that are blown out (like the clock).  Now I can fix some of this in Lightroom thanks to "recovery" and "fill light" but it still doesn't give me the range of what my eyes saw.  See below:

While this doesn't look half bad it's still nothing compared to the range that 6 (or 3 or 9) bracketed shots can give you.  The final HDR was first processed in Photomatix, then further tweaked in Lightroom and then finally brought into Photoshop using layers, blacked out the sky and brighten up up the bridge in the forground.

If you haven't check out the rest of the photos form the London trip check them out here.