HDR with moving clouds

[bwana]

Since my camera doesnt auto bracket more than +/- 1 stop, I set it to shutter priority and make a bunch of exposures by varying the shutter speed. This way I can get 7 exposures for a good coverage of dynamic range. The idea is to get an exposure where the darkest shadows are properly exposed, another exposure where the lightest highlights are properly exposed, and a bunch of exposures in between these two endpoints. Trouble is the clouds are moving!

I tried selecting the clouds and performing and HDR of them separately. Unfortunately, the HDR software sees where I 'cut out' the stationary parts of the picture and anchors all the images to those outlines (land and trees) The clouds are still blurred!

Any hints on how to proceed?

[Alan Smallbone]

Two things for you to try, first use Photoshop cs5 to align all the images and make a 32 bit hdr file, then tonemap in another app. Photoshop will let you select a base image for dealing with movement. The other thing is take you tonemapped image with the blurry clouds and then choose one of the original frames with the clouds exposed the way you would like them and bring the two images into photoshop and use a layer mask to bring the clouds from the single image and overlay the blurred clouds in the tonemapped image. This will also give you natural looking clouds.

Alan

[Guillermo Luijk]

Any hints on how to proceed?

Use only one of the input files for outputting the sky area.