The Photo Canvas Blog

After a weekend of image evaluating and score tabulating by a panel of HDR experts and enthusiasts, we’re excited to announce the winners of our first HDR Walkshop Photo Contest!

The APC HDR Walkshop with Brian Matiash at Photoshop World Las Vegas, held earlier this month, was universally praised as a good time and a great learning experience. About 30 walkers joined Brian, co-leader Jacob Lucas, and the crew from Artistic Photo Canvas for a walking photo workshop in Old Las Vegas focused on high dynamic range photography.

Fremont Street Experience – a flashy, neon-lit entertainment district oozing with character and texture – is the destination for millions of tourists and locals. It was the perfect locale for capturing brackets, which our walkers post-processed into a fantastic batch of HDR goodness that’s now on display in this colorful, full-size slideshow version of the APC HDR Walkshop Photo Contest group pool on Flickr – where you can see and enjoy all of the entries.

Many entries represented walkers’ first foray into HDR bracketing and post-processing. We were roundly impressed with the quality of the entry pool overall, and especially the efforts and results of the participants for whom, less than a month ago, HDR was but a tantalizing concept.

Choosing winners was a truly difficult task. Every judge – including Brian, Jacob, RC Concepcion (Educator and curriculum developer for NAPP, co-host of Layers TV, writer for Photoshop User Magazine & Layers Magazine, and HDR expert) and Lew Bedell and Bob Melson (co-founders of APC, sponsor of the HDR Walkshop) – brought their own judging criteria to the table – with opinions as diverse as the body of work that is classified as HDR. The winning images represent the convergences of those varied tastes and sensibilities.

So – with heartfelt thanks and kudos to every walker – here are your winning entries…

1st Place: “Fremont Street Vegas” by Toni Vaughan

Toni’s image showcases a nice balance of HDR processing. It’s strong without being over-the-top, bringing out all of the rich textures of the scene. The composition is very appealing in its skewed angle and the way that it only shows a portion of the Fremont Street ‘Las Vegas’ sign.

Toni will receive a Custom 32″ x 48″ Gallery Wrapped Canvas featuring her winning image courtesy of Artistic Photo Canvas.

2nd Pace: “The Dark End of the Street” by William Beem

William did a really nice job of capturing the full dynamic range of the scene. He recovered most of the detail that would normally have been blown out in the neon and lit signs. The textures brought out of the pavement were also fantastic.

William will receive a Custom 24″ x 36″ Gallery Wrapped Canvas featuring his winning image courtesy of Artistic Photo Canvas.

3rd Place (tie): “Fremont East” by Damien Jemison

Damien had a very strong composition, showcasing the Fremont Street Experience front and center. He did a great job of leading the eye through the frame and supported it with some great HDR processing.

Damien will receive a Custom 12″ x 18″ Gallery Wrapped Canvas featuring his winning image courtesy of Artistic Photo Canvas.

3rd Place (tie): “Retouched HDR Photowalk – Vegas” by Dave Clayton

Dave presented a nice juxtaposition of urban structures interwoven with the natural elements of palm trees and shrubbery. His HDR processing was clean and subtle. David also operated with a significant handicap due to the limitations of his camera, but worked through them quite admirably to get the brackets that he needed for tone-mapping.

Dave will receive a Custom 12″ x 18″ Gallery Wrapped Canvas featuring his winning image courtesy of Artistic Photo Canvas.

Congratulations contest winners! We can’t wait to see these great HDR images printed on canvas!

We hope every registered participant of the APC HDR Walkshop at Photoshop World Las Vegas feels like a winner too. We all enjoyed the interactive, expert HDR instruction, the camaraderie, the after-party. And every walker scored an APC “My photos ROCK on canvas” t-shirt and an APC gift card. We hope those cards will be put to use bringing many more of the HDR images entered in the contest to life on canvas.

Soon, we’ll be posting a wrap-up of the entire Walkshop event in photos – and showing off more of the judges favorites. (Subscribe to The Photo Canvas Blog RSS feed in your favorite reader or bookmark us to follow the action!)

We welcome your comments below – and we’re sure the contest participants will also appreciate and enjoy reading any comments and kudos you care to share with them on Flickr.

Today (Sunday, September 12, 2010) is the last day to be entered into renowned world and humanitarian photographer David duChemin’s drawing to win a 20″ x 30″ gallery wrapped canvas print of “Vast” – one of the remarkable images captured during his recent trek to Iceland.

Your chance to win is a bonus with the purchase of David’s latest eBook “Iceland: A Monograph.” An awe-inspiring and enlightening 65-page exploration of images and techniques, “Iceland: A Monograph” is part of duChemin’s The Print & The Process Series, designed “to discuss the process of creation in a way that pulls the curtain back on techniques.”

To read more about “Iceland: A Monograph,” as well as purchase the eBook for just $4.00 (20% discount from the regular price of $5.00 also expires today) – and receive an automatic entry into the drawing for his breathtaking print of “Vast” – please visit this link at David duChemin’s website.

On the heels of Photoshop World Las Vegas and our successful first-ever conference event – APC’s HDR Walkshop with Brian Matiash – the timing couldn’t be better to share with you the final chapter in Brian’s phenomenal HDR Best Practices Guide. Get ready to learn from a master… and enjoy!

By Brian Matiash, Photographer

We’ve had quite the journey thus far.  By now, you have rocked it out in the field and captured some fantastic brackets. You’ve also nailed down your image management process, ensuring that you know exactly which images you will be tone-mapping. This leaves us with our final phase. The last stop. I admit it’s bold to say that every digital image you take will see some sort of technical refinement but it’s the truth. Barring strict photojournalistic ethics, just about every image you share, in one way or another, will be refined to taste.

The term most commonly used to describe this refining phase is called ‘Post Processing’. It’s also typically referred to simply as ‘Post’, as will be the case for the rest of this Guide. The craftsmanship of your final results rests squarely on your ability to utilize and navigate through the tools that you have at your disposal. In most cases, people usually make core adjustments to an image: the exposure level, contrast, and saturation. HDR imaging brings it to a whole new level because before you can even start adjusting any of those values, you first have to derive your tone-mapped image.

If you think about it, your brackets are the paint on your easel. The quality of these brackets will directly affect the color and quality of what you can paint with.  Hopefully, the first two parts of this Best Practices Guide have helped ensure you get the best possible brackets. An optimal series of brackets will contain detail ranging from the highlight areas (typically found in the darkest bracket images) through the mid-tones (the normal exposures) and onto the shadows (the brightest bracket images). Reviewing these brackets while still in the field is integral to ensure that you get the correct details in all of your exposures before leaving the scene.

You’ve seen me use the term ‘tone-mapping’ here and you’ve likely read it on other websites.  For the sake of thoroughness, let me quickly and loosely define the term as it is a critical step in the HDR process.  In actuality, just about every LCD and printer that you are currently using cannot accurately display all of the data in an HDR image. There is simply too much information in the highlight and shadow areas for your screen to output. To mitigate that limitation, algorithms have been created to ‘tone-map’ the HDR image into a range that your screen and printer can handle. This process of scaling the HDR image down is done at a pixel-by-pixel level and, as a result, you really want to make sure that the pixels found in all of your brackets contain enough exposure detail so that the entire scene is represented accurately.

Continue reading…