I wasn’t very happy with the Fattal tone mapping on my HDR Fountain photo. I experimented with different tone mapping algorithms and parameters to those operations and eventually settled on Durand. According to Parameters for tone mapping operators, Durand “produces the most realistic pictures. No extreme effects, but very nice output with lots of details in the picture.” I used the following parameters with Durand:
- Base Contrast: 4.4
- Spatial Kernel Sigma: 7.0
- Range Kernel Sigma: 5.1
- Result Size: 6000×4000
- Pre-gamma: 0.52
I didn’t change any of the levels or gamma in Luminance HDR. Instead, I used GIMP and treated the HDR result as if it were an image that came out of my camera. I employed the usual techniques of making layers, creating layer masks, and setting the layer modes to achieve the effects that I’m after for certain portions of the image.
Here’s the result:
