Hello and welcome to Part 1 of the motleypixel.com HDR Tutorial. What is HDR? For those of you, if you don’t know HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, so in this tutorial we are going to take three photographs. All at different exposures and merge them together to create an HRD photograph.
Now, whether you’re shooting with a pointing shoot or shooting with the more advance digital SLR system, you can take photographs and create a HDR images following the following prerequisites.
First prerequisite, you need any camera with the capability to manually adjust EV, that is exposure value. You need to have the capability to shift the exposure value, negative and plus that is under expose and over expose and also take a normal exposure forward to zero EV exposure.
The second thing, has a prerequisite, preferred software such as photometric and Adobe Photoshop for further post processing. A tripod is highly recommended, a subject that has zero to little movement and a good scene such as the storm front or stormy clouds.
Plus for Part 1, I’d like to tough base with the EV exposure value settings and how you would use an advance digital SLR system. Many of the advances digital SLR system such as these Canon 30D has a function called AEB (Auto Exposure Bracketing). Please read the manual if you do have a system level to AEB, it will save you a lot of time and you will get better performance. Essentially, AEB will take usually three exposures back-to-back and you can set the EV value for each exposure.
In my case for the example, I will show in this tutorial of the barn with the cloudy sky. I took a -2EV, a 0EV and then a +2EV using AEB on this system. Now, if you’re using a normal pointer shoot camera system, some of the more advance point shoot camera’s that you offer AEB and that’s a plus but don’t worry if you don’t have a AEB but you have EV controls, that’s not a problem either.
Again, it’s highly recommend to set up on a tripod and if you’re doing adjustments between each of the 3, 4 or 5 exposures that you take, be sure that you move as quickly as possible so that you limit time between each exposure. This concludes Part 1 of the motleypixel.com HRD Tutorial. Thank you.
Welcome back. This is the Part 2 of the motleypixel.com HRD Tutorial.
Now, that we captured our images, all three of our exposures and save them to our computer. In this case, HRD folder on my desktop, the raw are named normal, over and under to signify there exposure values.
We opened Photomatix Pro 3.0; the first page that you come to is the workflow shortcut’s dialog box. We want to generate HRD image, browse and we want to open all three or how would many exposure you have in this case. Click Okay to open all the exposures.
Next dialog is generating HRD options. You may not have this by default check but insure that you have the align sources checked and attempt to reduce ghosting art effects checked and leave everything else’s depot and click okay. Now the system will start converting the raw and merging the images.
Okay, process is almost complete. Okay, once the process is complete, you will see just a preview of the merge exposures. It never looks great at this stage. The next thing you want to do though is you want to go the tone mapping so click the tone-mapping button, will bring us to the tone mapping, and editing screen.
Now you may have medium or small radio button check for the preview, just check the radio button to fit the screens so you have a larger preview. Now we’ll ran the tone mapping settings, your going to have detail enhancer’s tab and tone compressor tab. I have never used tone compressor. I don’t recommend to using it. You can try it.
Detail enhancer is the normal workflow I use to generate my HDR’s. Marching down the settings here, the strength, this is the HRD strength. I normally have here around 90-95. It defaults roughly at 60. Color saturation self explanatory, I think it defaults around 50.
The next settings we have here is light smoothing. Light smoothing is going to produce your most dramatic effects and changes. To the far left, you’re going to have more of an art C type so realistic image and over to the right, the smoothing, light smoothing is very low and in this case. You’re not going to see as much HDR at this setting, so what I normally is have here around the three quarter to ½ mark.
Next setting is luminosity. This is just going to increase your luminosity and normally I have it around four. I think it defaults to one. The next theory is the histogram and I’m not sure if you took note of this but as you make changes to all of these settings on this tab. You’ll see the histogram shift, so keep in mind; you want to try to keep it to be in the center. The pick in the center in a nice smooth lot of surface area underneath here for lots of data.
Next section is the tone color and micro and smoothing tab. Normally, I just stay on the tone tab, starts here and adjust my white point and black point for this particular image. I wanted my white point around .7. I think it’s quite lower around .2 by default. Black I have up to about .2% and Gamma I have at one.
Moving on down, there is a back arrow to undo any changes, previous changes and there is a preset. Here, you can load and save settings. I am going to go back up to color. Color is an important tab; I do shift with this from time to time. Temperature saturation highlights and shadow. Micro setting here, I very rarely use micro setting as well as the smoothing setting.
Now we’re ready to process our HRD image. All right, images just about finished processing here. Now, you see the final result in image here, last you want to file save us. I highly recommend saving as 16 bit, tiff and we’re going to leave it at under and two more on the desktop 16 bit tiff so we can render it in Photoshop and do some noise remove on other adjustments.
Stay tuned for Part 3 of the motleypixel.com HDR Tutorial.
Welcome back. This is the Part 3 of the motleypixel.com HRD Tutorial.
In this last part, we will address the final post processing cleaning up of the 16-bit tiff HDR that we generated with Photomatix. Kind of go ahead and launch Adobe Photoshop. I’m going to browse to our desktop and open that 16-bit tiff that we generated with Photomatix. Here it is.
All right, I’m going to go ahead and start with duplicating the layer. Okay, the layer is duplicated. I want to next start with a layer mask, select the layer. Going to go and do a small adjustment here. Adjustment, shadow and highlights and bring the shadow amount down to zero. Highlights up to about 20, go okay.
Next, I’m going to select our mask with the white paintbrush, large with hardness zero. Large paintbrush of 911 pixels and I’m going to paint awhile a little bit and that contrast that I added in the previous step. That looks good and I’m going to add another layer and duplicate. Okay, I’m going to go up to my filters. I’ve got a noise ninja. I have a save profile to my liking with noise ninja. You can use any noise removal software. I highly recommend investing in some good noise removal software and click okay. It’s going to remove the noise. The noise reattaching is complete.
Next step, I’m going to change the mode to eight bits per channel so I can as jpeg. Save file, save as jpeg to my desktop. Save it as copy to the desktop. Maximum and it’s going to have here around six mock. Okay, it save as a jpeg on the desktop, I’m going to close Adobe Photoshop the final photograph in jpeg form.
If you want to look at my version of this full process, it is available at motleypixel.com under the stock photography-landing page. You can download the full resolution for free by using the download air on the button right.
I want to thank you for tuning in to the motleypixel.com HRD Tutorial. Goodbye.
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