I had a rather dingy looking picture of Candlestick Tower that I took during our visit to the Moab area last June. I decided to see what tone mapping using Mantiuk ’06 would do for it…
Below is the cleaned up and cropped version that I started with. I edited out the sensor dust to make an image to feed the tone mapping operator. It seems that Mantiuk ’06 is really good at finding sensor dust in the sky. When used on a person, it’ll find the smallest skin blemishes or even perspiration that you might not even notice in the starting photo.
As a consequence, I often do a significant amount of masking. If the image has people in it, I’ll mask them out of the tone layer. In the above photo, I masked the sky out entirely as it had entirely too much noise for my liking. I will sometimes partially mask some of the really intense highlights too.
