Looking for advice on how to avoid that burnt out sun

spooky donkey

now I know the sun is burning by default But i was wondering if any one had and advice for me on how to avoid that burnt out look, as in my example below.
Now I know its a HDR image but every exposure has the burnt out sun.
I used a wide angle with a poliarizer on it and was wondering if an ND filter or some other kinda of filter would give me a better result.
I intend to try NDs on my next dawn outing.


hey bale sun up by BarryKelly, on Flickr

magicbastarder

i don't think the problem is the burnt out sun; it's the over-abrupt transition in the clouds beside it. is that an artefact of the HDR process, or do the original images look the same?

kelly1

I don't see how you could avoid it really. I suppose a GND would be your best bet. If you get the exposure of the sun right (don't even know if that's possible!), everything else is going to be in silhouette.

magicbastarder

also, there's an obvious gradient within the burnt out section, which makes it look even less realistic again.

spooky donkey

yeah all the expours were the same. Ill try the ND then and perhaps take 2 exposures and try to blend them rather than try the HDR.

spooky donkey

Just to take this away from being a HDR debate I just merged the +2 and -2 exposures in PS.

the above 1/3 is the -2 and the below 2/3s is +2 so you can see that the -2 sun is still burned out. Perhaps a much shorter exp time was needed. I did have the camera on appture priorty and set it to the lowest I think 4.5 or there abouts..


blended exp hay feild by BarryKelly, on Flickr

magicbastarder

that looks much better. of course you're going to get a burned out sun - it's the sun, for god's sake.

but in that pic you don't have the abrupt transition in the clouds.

ScumLord

Wouldn't there be no data in the sun itself? It's just blown out past white and there's nothing that can be done bar painting it in again.

The more detail you pull back in around the sun the more abrupt the transition from past white to colour data will look. That's why I would have thought it looks better in the second one you have a transition through the whites and you can't see the instant change like you do in the first one.

Is it possible to mask out sections of an image for the HDR process? I've only recently started trying HDR.

spooky donkey

yes I would say it would be but it would start to get hairy at the niggly bits.

I have to say I love the coulds in the HDR version but the sun did come out better with the 2 layered expousers..

SemperFidelis

Try setting the aperature to it's smallest, something like f22 and take a fast exposure for sun detail, then some slower ones for foreground detail. Manual mode is probably best for this so you can have full control of aperature and shutter speed.

Here's one I took at f22, sun is still burnt out though.

DaireQuinlan

well it IS, as MB points out, the sun ! It's about 500 million billion* times brighter than anything else in the scene. Plus you're shooting digital, which doesn't really handle blown highlights so well. Even film wouldn't be able to handle this , although the transitions would look a lot nicer. You might even get a funky solarisation (black hole sun) effect ...


*may not be correct