Why does my night HDR image show so much noise in the sky?
Asked 1/17/2012
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I tried a 3-shot HDR of a night scene in Photomatix. The properly exposed single RAW->JPG looks much cleaner, but after HDR/tonemapping the dark sky becomes very noisy. I planned to retouch moving subjects and clean up the image later, but the sky noise seems excessive. Am I doing something wrong when shooting or processing night HDR?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
14y ago
2 Answers
8
Firstly it's essential to distinguish between HDR imaging and tonemapping. You produce a high dynamic range image from multiple exposures, but then in order to display the result on a typical low dynamic range monitor you need to convert it down to a low dynamic range image. This step is known as tonemapping, and is generally responsible for the "HDR look".
Secondly dynamic range is inversely proportional to the image noise floor. It's the difference between the brightest thing you can capture, and the point at which detail is lost to noise in the shadows. Thus if you have very little noise, you gain extra detail in the shadow and thus have higher dynamic range.
You can tonemap from either high dynamic range or low dynamic range images (the latter is sometimes referred to as "single image HDR" or "fake HDR"). The only difference is that if you try and tonemap an image with low dynamic range (hence higher noise) this noise will become very apparent in the output.
Fundamentally the problem here is that the dynamic range of your scene is far too large. Think about what you're photographing, the bright areas of the ice are lit by intense floodlights. What about the shadow areas of the image? They're lit by reflected light (after bouncing multiple times), distant man-made ambient light, moonlight and starlight etc.
The point is the dynamic range is huge between the ice and the dark areas. So the dyanamic range of your original blend is not high enough, hence you have excess noise in the tonemapped result by the processes described above. Essentially tonemapping is trying to even out the brightness where that simply isn't practical.
Even if you expanded the range of intital captures you'd still have difficulties with bloom and flare when trying to image dark regions next to extremely bright ones. Personally I'd forget about trying to shoot tonemapped HDR in these situations - I think your original image looks fine.
Originally by user1375. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user1375
14y ago
0
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Most likely the noise is coming from the tonemapping step, not from HDR itself. In a night scene, a black or very dark sky often contains little real detail to recover. When you include an overexposed frame or aggressively lift shadows, the software can treat noise as if it were detail and amplify it.
A few key points:
- HDR combines exposures to capture more dynamic range, but the final visible result depends on tonemapping.
- Tonemapping and shadow lifting can strongly increase shadow noise.
- A very dark sky will not gain meaningful detail just because it’s in an HDR merge.
What to try:
- Exclude the overexposed shot and see if the sky improves.
- Use gentler tonemapping / less shadow boosting.
- If needed, manually mask in the sky from the cleaner single exposure.
In short: your HDR process is probably pushing the sky too far. For night scenes, it’s often better to preserve the sky from a clean exposure rather than try to extract detail that isn’t really there.
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