Railroad-Crossing

Railroad-Crossing, originally uploaded by mavenimagery® Bringin Artist 2Gether For Cancer.

Processed by: mavenimagery Lab, Universal Studio, Californa.

Realistic HDR. Initially, tonemapped as Hyper-mind-boggling HDR. Colors and excess of high dynamic range have been removed with IRET (Iris Range Enhancement Technology).
IRET (Iris Range Enhancement Technology and MavenFilters are products of mavenimagery Labs Innovation.


Important: View in large size for Non-Brain Hindrance Perception.

Colors and excess dynamic range have been skillfully removed with IRET as a favor to your brain, making it easier to see. This feat is not everyone's cup of tea (or coffe, if you drink coffe, that is). Your brain is very important organ and without it you're nothing but a cabbage (or lettuce, choose your veg. Wisher, my pet, loves lettuce and since he is on of the smartest animals in the world, he should know best). Although, on any given day, the range of light is enormous, your brain (my brain, too) selfishly cares only about reflectance, and its range comparatively modest. Due to this selfisness you're not blind and homeless. Maybe not homeless, but blind nonetheless. Since your brain is trying to figure out surface reflectances (any surface reflects only 1% of the light it receives, and reflectances over 100% are forbidden by...you guessed it, your brain. Smart organ, eh?) based on what it sees, the huge range of illumination is often more hindrance to perception than a help. Therefore, an artist who skillfully removes the excess dynamic range in a painting or in an HDR image is actually doing your brain a favor. Said above and I'll say it again and again. Skill and practice required to accomplish this feat, for a painter or a HDR artist who is inexperienced and, pathetically tries to outsmart his or her brain along with insulting our brain, does not know how to create the illusion of range within the limited reflectances available, will create something more like a cartoon than a rendition or sometimes, will go to the extreme, creating mega-saurated-candy-like colors which can result in great damage to human eye, and possibly Hyper-HDR your vision to blindness. Realistic painting techniques were perfected by the Dutch and Flemish masters during the Renaissance...that's why it pays off to have an artistic inate talent and some kind of artistic background as opposed to geeky-computers-science-background. Do you get the HDR picture or should I draw an HDR diagram? HDR photography is no brainer and can create magical, compelling images if done moderately...it can easily be overdone so take short breaks and come back with fresh eyes. It is quite understandable to favor a 'wow look' HDR to tack-sharp-glossy images we have become so accostomed in commercial photography and magazines. As humans, we get bored so easily with things and always welcome something new in our lives. New car, new digital gizmo, new helmet (even if it's made from cheese), new girl/boy-friend (we go for less than we already have regardless, as if wearing liquor goggles, our perceptions altered due to drunkenness and so we believe that a new, potential romantic partner is more attractive). New,new, new...
As Rick Sammon's put it: The subject often dictates the effect.
By this he means that not every subject is suitable for HDR. And since when we started to like the tiny grains and texture on a wall? Do we really have to see every little texture and flowery-wallpaper-like patterns inside a cathedral or every single petal in its garden? Flemish masters, before the Renaissance and Rembrandt, late 18th.Century English landscape painter Jonh Constable, have created paintings brimming with flat, overly-defined-unrealistic details and texture, e.g. a foliage in the far background that revealed details which normally impossible to see with the human eye.
It's a lot easier to create an artistic image than a realistic one, and, today, there are countless softwares and tools where you can easily (faster) create an artistic or unrealistic image. In any image editing software (not limited to Photomatix or Photoshop) all you have to do just crank up the sliders and you'll have a hard time deciding on which effect should you settle.