This is a rant, about halos.
I fucking hate halos!
I’ll be the first to say that I’m far from perfect myself and I know I have a little bit of halo here and there, but I do my best to try to limit them to a minimum, and at some points it’s nearly impossible not to get them and sometime even I have to accept a tiny bit of them. But every day I see photos with so much halos that it’s crazy! What’s the matter with people, do they not see them?
I see so so many landscape photos with massive halos around tree lines, mountain edges, well, what ever edge or line there is in a photo and where the contrast is really high.
People always add so much contrast and darken their skies to make them less uninteresting and more dramatic (which they don’t, they just look weird if it’s done in the amount that I’m talking about). And then they lighten up the ground so much and it all just looks so fake and unnatural and usually results in massive halos. And the same goes to many shots with people in them. People are lighten up so much that it looks nearly like they’re radioactive with a glow all around them. And this is not only in amateur’s photos, I see them in commercial photography too, in magazines and online. All the time.
I mean, what in the actual fuck is going on?
This do have a lot to do with badly done HDR photography, since nicely done HDR photography does not suffer from this problem. But not always, a lot of it is just from regular single shot photos. Photos that are destroyed.
And I don’t know how it can just keep on going, are people blind?
This leads me to my second hate object, crooked horizons. I mean, holy crap, people can put effort into some type of post production (like making halos…fuck me) and still they post a photo where the horizon is tilting to one side or the other. The first thing is to straighten the horizon! That’s what you have to do first, before any other post processing. And of course, this should be done in camera, so you don’t have to sacrifice anything of your actual photo in post production, while straighten and cropping out the tilting bits, but that doesn’t always happen and that’s okay since it’s fixable in post (with the sacrifice of pixels).
I’ve had to do it myself, like I said, I’m far from perfect. And to level up the horizon in landscape shots, before with my old DSLR I used the focus points in the view finder, then got a level for the hot shoe which made it much easier. My cameras today all have built in electronic levels for the view finder and back screen which makes it really easy. So if you have a modern camera, there isn’t really any excuses for not getting it right in camera (except for not using it which is dumb), but if so, it not only can be corrected, it should be done before posting online.
End of rant.