Use HDR Software Like Photomatix
To Tackle Halos, Noise and Grain

HDR software like Photomatix's advanced photo editing software easily handles halo, noise and grain.



You should gather some understanding of how to correct common SNAFUs that pop up.

Halos: An amateur tone mapper fails to get rid of the circular rings of light around an object (tree, building, etc.) which is protruding into the sky.

Based on my aforementioned settings, changes to three controls can rectify the situation. If it feels like you are splitting hairs, welcome to the club.

Yuck!

Let's right this ship before she sinks.

Firstly, adjust your strength to around the 30 range.

Secondly, put your Light Smoothing to Very Low.

And thirdly, throw the Highlights Smoothing all the way to the left to Zero.

After that, you can raise your strength as far as you can before the halos reappear.

You are always going to see a lighter area near the horizon, but your goal is to try to make the gradient as gradual as possible.

There, that's better.

Noise: See those brightly-coloured specks in the shadow/low light areas? Yeah, they came with the image. Blame it on electronics. Anyways, you can't get back what's gone, but you can manage the problem a bit.

For the purpose of this exercise, we won't. By example, let's try noise reduction through the default HDR software function.

As you can see by the example, there is some nasty little speck action going on.

The default Luminosity is zero, so lower it to -5 (halfway between zero and the lower limnit of -10). Rule of thumb: higher luminosity equals more noise.

Bring your Strength back to the 30 range.

Crank that Black Point up to around 2.5. Watch the dark areas become darker.

Now get the noise colour down. Lower the Saturation Shadows to less than zero. How about -5? Sure, why not.

Lastly, bump up the Shadows Smoothing and Shadows Clipping. Somewhere around 50 for each should float your boat.

See the photo below for the outcome.

Same thing with the Luminosity - To zero.

Now on to the Micros...raise the Micro-Smoothing just a little (one or two increments) and lower Microcontrast (I brought mine back to zero).

For this example, I noticed a yellow-red-orange tone so I changed some other settings after tackling the grain. I slid the gamma to the left and lowered the colour temperature.

To learn how your HDR software handles RAW image processing, click here.