hdr #3
First of all, before going into any explanations about this image I’ll have to say I’ve become a raw addict and all the shots from that night were in that format. Now, at first I tried using one raw file and making three shots with different exposures to merge them. What resulted in so much noise (same problem mentioned by David from chromasia here) that I had to (thank God I did a few exposures of this scene) to take the three raw shots I had. They weren’t intended for this purpose originally. It was rather a not-so-good fine tuning of exposure that I had to retake three times, that’s why I first tried the one file method with the best exposed one. In the end, I still had to use noise reduction and you can probably notice the softening it caused, but there is some sort of magic about hdr images that lets me accept the softness.