High Dynamic Range Digital Photography For Dummies®

Chapter 11. Cleaning Up Your Photos

In This Chapter

• Reducing noise

• Removing distractions

• Resolving distortion

• Reworking color and saturation

• Re-leveling lightness

• Re-something-or-other to do with smoothing

• Publishing your HDR photos on the Web or printing them

Tone mapped images don't always come out of your favorite HDR application looking perfect. In fact, most of the time, they need further editing before they're "perfect." Some images have too much noise (a common problem with HDR) in general, or they may need different levels of noise reduction in different areas. Some have dust, moving objects, or other distracting things that are best removed. Many images have lens distortion, which wide angle lenses tend to accentuate. At times, you'll see color problems — too much, too little, too much of a single color, or the wrong color. And on top of all this, artifacts can appear in tone mapped images that are the result of movement in the scene.

This chapter shows you common problems that plague HDR images and gives you solid techniques to combat them. I show you how to reduce noise and blend that reduction in with the rest of the image, and I show you a few different ways to remove distractions, such as dust and other objects.

This chapter won't show you how to correct every image problem in the known universe in every possible way — but you won't run into many problems that aren't here or in ...