First Night-Scene HDR

I like it too. I would recommend cropping off the upper 1/3rd of the image. The subject is more important than all of the black sky. Plus you get a nifty panorama out of it. Slightly out of focus gives it a dream quality. If you print it, choose the paper that will emphasize the dark areas. A Matte paper will most likely have a less saturated black to it and making it look washed out.

Flash may lighten up the foreground area and ruin the lovely reflected colors on the water. Blown out lights are to be expected uder these conditions. Just live with it and see it as part of the composition. Your eyes will see these lights the same way as a camera. Try manually focusing to get what you want. Then run a test by starting with f8, then shoot f11, f16, f22, and maybe f32. Then finish each HDR image and study the differences to see which worked best for the lens and camera. Once you see what you like, print it at the largest size you think it can go to, so you know it looks as good as you want. If yes, have a happy addiction.

CHEERS...Mathew

Stopping the lens down a bit more would likely reduce the glare/flare around the lights. It does on most lenses. BTW, you say you shot "wide open @ 5.6" but assuming you mean the Canon EF 24-105 f/4L IS, wide open on that lens is f/4 at all focal lengths. f/8-11 might be the best setting for sharpness and flare resistance.

Flash would not have effected anything but the close foreground, and I doubt you want to change that.

However you determine focus, after it is set, turn off autofocus for all shots. That should keep the camera from trying to change the focus slightly on subsequent exposures. That should help with miss-focus induced softness. I believe that camera has a extra high precision AF point in the center, but that only offers help if the lens is f/2.8 or faster. Your lens would not be affected.

I have not used Photomatrix but I believe best results are made by feeding your raw images directly into it without pre-processing. I'm sure someone else with experience in this will chime in.

Were you able to pull any of the lights down with the HDR?

To me, the one aspect of your image that contributes most to making it appear soft is the veiling flare around the bright lights. There are two possible causes for this: (a) a slight mist in the air, maybe so slight that you didn't even notice it at the time; and (b) light scattering in your optics.

Assuming (a) wasn't present, scenes with very bright lights against a very dark background are extremely demanding on the optics, and require a highly flare-resistant lens + the utmost cleanliness of the lens. I keep high quality protective UV filters over my lenses most of the time, but this is one of those situations where knowing that "every little bit counts", I probably would have removed it.

HDR or other techniques (eg, heavy use of the "fill" slider in ACR or LR) that try to bring out details in the shadows require even more care than conventional, single exposure images.

If you have easy access to this location why don't you go back and re-shoot it, paying attention to the issues I mentioned above. For example, if you own a 35 or 50 mm good quality, very clean prime lens, do an A/B comparison of that lens to your zoom, with and without a protective filter, etc.

Good luck,

Tom M

In fact, looking more carefully at the areas around the bright lights, I'm even more convinced that you have scattering (eg, dirt / fog / haze) somewhere on your lens or filter. You just don't get highly structured patterns like you see in the attachment from atmospheric haze.

Tom M

PS - In the interest of full disclosure, I did sharpen the attached image to make the structure in the veiling flare easier to see.

...and to further support my contention that the visual impression of softness in the OP's image is mostly due to veiling flare, here is his image quickly tweaked to reduce some of the veiling flare around the lights.

Tom M

I do shoot in RAW but I do not have PS5 handy so I processed it directly through Photomatix, am I suppose to "pre" process RAW images first hand before doing anything?

For the pros and cons on this, see "Do I need to process bracketed RAW files to TIFF format first?" in the Photomatix FAQ (under the Help menu). I think it's usually best to process the raw files with your favorite raw converter and send the resulting TIFFs to Photomatix.

• Should I have used flash?

Usually the answer will be "No", though a weak off-camera flash during one of the exposures could make the fence structure more visible (not sure why you'd want this anyway). The fence is what I'd try to avoid including in the frame in the first place.

• Should I have used smal ler aperature? f16? f22 and resulting in long shutter?

Depends on of what you're trying to achieve. Most lenses perform the best around f/8, but if you're after more depth of field (more things in focus) you can do down do f/13-f/16. Don't go further than that w/o really knowing what you're after as diffraction will rob you of sharpness

• Should I have set my focus point to MANUAL and s et it to the center point? It was on AUTO I believe.

YES! YES! YES! The problem is that the camera's AF may (and will) focus a bit differently every time it does AF. And this, in turn, will change the magnification a bit (called breathing, happens on most lenses in the world). And then when you try to combine the images, a single pixel difference will cause horrible loss of image quality.

I believe this is what's caused loss of sharpness and then you had to oversharpen the image to make it look acceptably sharp.

• I do shoot in RAW but I do not have PS5 handy so I processed it directly through Photomatix, am I suppose to "pre" process RAW images first hand before doing anything?

There are different techniques for that - just google for HDR tutorials. What I find interesting is that if you create .HDR image using Phtoshop's "Merge to HDR" feature and the do the tone mapping in Photomatix, the results are much more pleasing and natural compared to doing the whole process inside Photomatix.

Another suggestion. Seeing how the lights are so bright, you may want to check the histogram of the darkest and the brightest images before leaving the scene. If the darkest image has blown highlights (peaks at the rightmost part of the histogram), usually it means you won't be able to recover them using HDR. If the brightest image has blocked shadows (peaks at the leftmost part of the histogram), it means you won't be able to recover some shadow details. Of course, sometimes there's nothing to recover in some images, e.g. black sky in your case - in this case blocked shadows are fine. If you see a problem with your image, just reshoot using a wider range of exposures (or start with negative EV compensation if blown highlights are your priority).

Regards,
Jean

I think it's quite possible the tonemapping is the source of the veiling flare -- or at least is responsible for accentuating it.