If you have software skills I strongly recommend you forget about this old analog technology. ND Grads are bulky, expensive, degrade image quality and are very limited, insofar as the exposure reduction is fixed, as is both the softness and geometry of the transition zone.

In 99% of cases you are better off with two separate exposures, which are then masked together in Photoshop or similar. Layer masks are non- destructive, and infinitely adjustable at the pixel level. You can do a much better transition in five minutes than is ever achievable with a grad, after which all parameters of the two different layers are also separately adjustable. Then flatten and Bob's your uncle. Do this once and you will never go back to the buggy whip...

Just one quick example.

I did three versions. First is the "Perfect HDR" method, making the 32 bit file in Photomatix and then tonemapping in Lightroom. It came out surprisingly well, and looks almost exactly like the version done purely in Photomatix. I'm limited to three attachments, so I won't post the Px version. However it is worth considering that processing on Photomatix, while a bit more trouble, gives many more options for different looks.

Next is the SNS version. Quite different, but look how clean the red and white sign is above the resturant.

Finally is what I came up with, masking in the flag and sign from SNS, then putting the full SNS image on top as another layer and combining at low opacity in order to get a bit more natural-feeling (to me) tonality.

Ah...do take note that the final image is slightly cropped...

lightroom


SNS


final composite

OK, I'll try to answer all this in terms of my experience.

DxO always recommends that they be the first step in any processing workflow. What I do is to process every frame, for several reasons.

First, If you enable lens corrections, DxO is going to do geometry corrections, which I personally find desirable. Also, it will do vignetting correction, which is a great help, because it will get exaggerated in HDR processing. So there is no way to process some and not others, unless you disable most everything, and then there really isn't a point.

I have no idea what algorithm DxO uses for CA correction, but I have noticed a significant improvement in CA fringing, as compared to both non-corrected files and those corrected in ACR. This does NOT, however help the problem of glare around windows.

Window glare is absolutely a big problem, and I have no good solutions for it. One thing to try is to make sure your darkest frame is really dark--the problem really stems from the glass, but gets exaggerated. Yes, you could try leaving off the light frames in one tonemap, then doing a normal full tonemap, and masking the results together. Another thing you can do is to make the HDR without cropping, then mask the relevant parts of an original exposure selectively into the areas that need it. The problem there is that it is going to end up very dark most probably. Perhaps you can mask a lighter frame into the areas that are blown. Yet another possiblity is to hugely lift the shadows of your image either with curves or shadows/highlights in a duplicate layer and then mask only the lighter frame in. I think, though, that masking is the best bet. You can do multiple masks. Usually I do them one at a time and flatten the image in between, then do another. Sometimes you can use the dodge brush, but the results tend to be uneven on larger areas, and aren't reversible like masks.

What lens are you using? Some are worse than others for the glare problem.

I do suggest you try SNS for this, as it is much cleaner than Photomatix.

I have absolutely no desire to add light to my HDRs. I have never even considered it, since I want the natural contour of the ambient light, just compressed. I think you will find with a little masking work you can take care of the problem without carrying more gear--if you know how to use masking effectively in Photoshop. You can mask in the parts you need, and match tonality with curves. And of course you can change the opacity of and feather masks so that the transition is seamless.

That being said, I do a huge amount of PP work with Photoshop, especially with dodge and burn. Here is an example. Top is the original, bottom is after quite a bit of PP work. This was with a miserable lens, and I made the mistake of only shooting seven frames (in a big hurry and one of my first HDRs).

This lens flared like crazy. My newer lenses are much better in this regard. You might want to try out a wide prime like the Zeiss 15 to see if it helps with your problem.

straight out of Photomatix


after a few hours of PP

I strongly suggest contacting these guys.

http://www.backscatter.com/

You are going to have to make some port decisions depending on the lens you plan to use, and they will help you with expert advice--on housings as well.

Check also slrgear, cameralabs and lenstip for lens reviews that depend on more than opinio--that do at least some sort of controlled tests. DxOMark is also good, but they do not break down their overall ratings into categories. DPReview also has some lens tests.

Grads are fine, but limited--just to be aware that now there are better options to achieve what they are intended for.

Actually grads are completely obsolete--very old technology in this digital age. They give you a fixed exposure reduction with a fixed transition. They are expensive, fragile, bulky and reduce IQ. I gave mine up years ago. It is a simple matter to take two exposures and mask them together in PS. The results are infinitely better: you have full control of the shape and softness of the transition zone, and all image parameters are separately controllable for the two parts of the image: curves, brightness, saturation, color temperature--to name only a few.

There are times when I would like an ND 400 filter for water, but grads I miss not at all...

The raw files are converted to tiff and then combined to make the 32 bit .hdr file. After that they are both out of the picture.

I had one bracket series with the darkest file a bit too light, resulting in iffy highlights. I also converted those to tiff first, cranking up highlight recovery on that file. It made no difference.

What does make a difference is preprocessing in DxO Pro. One of the big issues with HDR is color artifacting due to CA--it gets "embedded" and exaggerated in off-axis contrast transitions. I sometimes spend a lot of time with selective color masking and desaturation or several-pixel-wide clone brushes post getting rid of such things.

I tried ACR eliminating color fringing to no great effect, but correcting CA and fringing in DxO dramatically reduces color artifacting, as well as offering very good vignetting and distortion correction with supported lens/body combos. I usually do all such corrections in post, but with HDR you have to really do them on your source files, and DxO does great and quick preprocessing. It ain't cheap, though...

If you like natural results and dislike halos I strongly suggest you try SNShdr. Christian Bloch, who wrote the HDR Handbook thinks it is great as well. It has a signature "clean" look, and it is absolutely, hands down, the most halo resistant of all the programs, although the new Expose 3 is very good as well.

But SNS gives good results right out of the box, so to speak--almost no learning curve, and has a good level of control. As I mentioned before, the downsides are that you cannot save the 32 bit intermediary file, and deghosting and alignment are not as strong as some others.

The developer says that a major upgrade is in the works and should be ready this month, and should include selective deghosting. I can hardly wait! (And it is cheap--unless you need batch processing, the home version is absolutely adequate)

Did I forget to mention that you can use masking?

Check it out:

http://www.sns-hdr.com/

Photomatix 5 is in beta. You can find a beta download link on their site.

I have done some experimenting converting my raws to tiffs before combining. I have to say that using DxO pro and ACR both to convert to tiff, I saw no significant difference between those and letting Photomatix make the tiffs in terms of the final result.

What will make a significant difference is combining to .hdr in Expose and then tonemapping in Photomatix--much much sharper with less contrast veiling. FWIW in Expose you can make adjustments to the image and save to .hdr or .exr, and then open and tonemap the image in Photomatix with the changes incorporated. This gives a whole new level of control, albeit you have to be careful or the results can look unnatural.

I do believe that Float has the same tools as Expose. For making the intermediary 32 bit image, Expose is excellent. The tonemapping I have not been so happy with. It is very good for not-too-extreme natural-looking images, but I find the actual controls quite limited for tonemapping. You get one look, and one look only, pretty much. It does maintain 32 bits throughout the process, which is a good thing. For my "look", I often try my bracketed images in three or four different programs (Photomatix, Oloneo, HDR Efex Pro, SNS, Expose--I own them all). I have yet to come up with one image from Expose that I like, although I am now using the .hdr file made with Expose and tonemapping in Photomatix and sometimes SNS, which gives really nice results sometimes.

Oloneo has a pretty good tonemapper, IMO, but it too has rather limited options. Oloneo does not do a stellar job at deghosting, which is very important to me, since these days I often am working with moving subjects.

I checked out this Perfect HDR stuff from Captain Photo. Well....yes and no....

Lightroom is very capable in its way, but the thing that needs to be understood is that there are basically two different ways of tonemapping, global and local. A global tonemapper has controls that affect the entire image at once. Relative tone values of different areas are not considered. Lightroom is a global tonemapper, and a good one at that, with the various controls that it contains. The advantage of a global tonemapper is that there is no haloing, and tonal values of the image are preserved relative to each other. In Lightroom, one has control over different tonal values independently--highlights and shadow sliders especially allow you to extract a lot of detail out of a 32 bit file in the extremes without affecting so much the mids (which can be adjusted with exposure and contrast controls).

But this is still quite different from a local tonemapper, which compares areas relative to each other and gives you control of how they appear. In Photomatix, and in Oloneo particularly, it is possible to have the highlights mapped darker than the shadows (which looks horrible, but it is possible). This opens up a world of possibility in terms of the final appearance. Below is a 14EV hdr of a tsunami hit house in northern Japan abandoned for over two years because it is in the exclusion zone around the Fukushima power plant. You will not get anywhere near this using a global tonemapper.

There is nothing wrong with global tonemapping: it can give very good results easily, but using a local tonemapper like Photomatix opens up a different world entirely.

house in exclusion zone

These lenses are made by Samyang in Korea. Most are quite good, some are really stellar. Go to photozone.de and check Samyang lenses in both Canon and Nikon sections for specific tests. Their 14mm is probably the best available in any mount. I have the 8mm fisheye, and it is great, also has a unique projection that makes the pictures less "fisheye" while still maintaining the angle of coverage. Go to Ken Rockwell and read his review of the Samyang 8mm fisheye. Samyang are also branded Pro Optic, Bower, Rokinon.

Yes, the newer 18-35 looks pretty decent--good review in photozone. However remember that 18 is considerably less wide than 14mm, although it is nice to be able to fit filters, and to get out to 35mm is handy.

I would be happy to do some sort of tutorial. I'm pretty anal about the results and often spend a lot of time in Photoshop after tonemapping the image.

The big problem with HDR has got to be the haloing and the fact that tonal values (for one reason or another) are not very natural in many areas of the photo. I am not shy about working extensively with the burn and dodge tools in Photoshop to get rid of haloing, and I sometimes make multiple copies of an image with different tonemapping settings or in different programs and mask them together. For instance, here is an image I took tonight in a hutong in Beijing. Most of the image was done in the Photomatix 5 beta (thanks for the heads-up!).

I selectively deghosted the girl carrying the bucket, however that exposure was dark and so Photomatix made it too light and it was very noisy. So (first time!) I actually masked the girl in from the original raw file. Also the sky was uneven in the Photomatix version (a common issue with Photomatix), so I made another version in SNS and masked the sky in from that, instead of struggling to clean up the sky with the dodge and burn tools (really difficult).

The fact is, for this kind of image, ONLY Photomatix (IME) gives such good results. In the SNS image, the brickwork in the wall on the right side was almost black--there was no way to get decent contrast between the bricks and the mortar, for instance. And the detail in the white tiles inside the door was similarly lost.

In more "normal" images, other programs can do a better, or at least cleaner job, but for this kind of extreme stuff (9 exposures one stop apart) Photomatix reigns supreme.

At this size the SNS version might seem nice because it is lighter. Ignore that and look at the microcontrast in dark and light areas. It's a shame that these are not larger and on a darker background :(

I definitely move beyond the "natural" look, but I try to find a nice balance. Grunge is not my thing. For "painterly" its Photomatix all the way.

Here is the finished photo, more or less


This is the SNS original--still HDR but very different tonality

I have been working extensively with HDR for a number of years, and I have pretty much tried everything out there. It is important to understand that not all HDR programs are created equal. They give very different looks, even when they are normalized to a certain degree. It is also important to note that much also deepends on the method of shooting and the subject. A rather normal +-2EV HDR shot in medium contrast situations requires a different technique than a +-7EV HDR shot in an extreme contrast situation. You are welcome to visit my photo galleries at toby-marshall.com to see what I do with HDR.

I will explain my experence with different HDR programs (and this is ONLY my experience based on the look that I try to achieve, as can be seen at the link above).

My favorite of all is Photomatix (i'll abbreviate it Px), but it has some major problems. First the good things:
1. Widest range of "looks" of any HDR program
2. Best deghosting by far of any program.
3. Best differentiation of tonality in the shadows and highlights--good for the "painterly" look and/or extreme HDR.
4. Very powerful and efficient image alignment.

And the not-so-good:
1. Strong haloing.
2. Strong color artifacts at times
3. Rather steep learning curve due to all the interactive controls.
4. Tendency towards contrast veiling.

************************************

While I use Photomatix at least partially for almost every HDR shot, I have come to highly appreciate a hidden gem: SNSHDR. Written by a single person in Poland, SNS gives the most natural results of any program I have tried, with extremely clean and smooth tonality.Creating the preview is quite processor intensive, but afterwards, controls respond in real-time, making adjustment easy. Controls and simple and quite flexible. In addition, the lack of haloing is noteworthy, better than any other program, including the new HDR Expose 3. It is also quite inexpensive: I believe the home edition (full control without batch processing) is 30 or 40 euros.

Downsides are:
1. Not possible to create a 32 bit hdr or exr file (although it will open one from another program)
2. Relatively weak alignment of images and deghosting.
3. Tonal microcontrast in shadows and highlights more limited than Px.

My workflow is to make the .hdr file in Photomatix, and then tonemap in both Px and SNS. I often blend the images in Photoshop, and/or mask different parts of the two tonemapped images together. These two programs make up the core of all my HDR work.

Note that a new version of SNS should be out in October, and it promises some major improvements to an already top HDR program.

*****************************

Recently I bought Expose 3. It has some great strengths, including very powerful image alignment tools, and decent deghosting (but not on the level of Photomatix.)

The .hdrs made with Expose 3 are really nice, extremely crisp when tonemapped in SNS or Photomatix. Personally I find the tonemapper itself disappointing (for me), although it is definitely worth a look for those who like a "natural" look.

***************************************

I have never liked the Photoshop HDR functionality, and do not use it at all. I bought Nik HDR Efex 2 and find it similarly disappointing. It is nice for mild HDR shots, but the tonality is quite hard and I find the presets more a gimmick than anything else. While the control points are a very nice idea, I find the overall flexibility quite limited and have never liked the look much. YMMV.

Every program has its plusses and minuses. It is worthwhile to try them and see what works best for your shots and the look you are trying to achieve.