Why bother with HDR? A camera can only see so much of the world with one photo. Imagine we take 9 photos and turn them into one uber good photo. It is a bit challenging. It take some planning and some software but you can do it. I am going to show how I do it. Is it the right way? Probably not. But it works well for me.
Here is a comparison of one photo to an HDR photo.
So what do you need? A camera that can shoot in manual mode. A tripod. Those are the two basics. You can’t hand hold for HDR.
I use a cable release as seen below – this way as soon as I press the button and hold it down the Nikon D300 cranks out 9 bracketed exposures. NINE! Each camera and camera manufacture is different. My Nikon D90 does 3 brackets photos and I have to use the remote control – it lacks a port for a cable release. So check your user manual and read up on bracketing.
Someone asked if it is better to manually change the exposure for each shot. I don’t think so. I shoot in manual mode all the time anyway – I like the control. I set the camera to continuous shooting mode – like in sports you want a lot of photos quickly. Clouds, water, leaves and even people move. You don’t want to go back to your camera every second to change things. You also risk moving your tripod and camera. Less risk the better.
I have two tripods that I use – both Manfrotto. And I have a variety of ballheads or joystick releases. I would advise getting a solid tripod that you can have for years that will hold your camera secure. You paid upwards of thousands of dollars for a camera and lens – don’t risk that on a cheap-o tripod. Icky.
So, this is what the 9 photos look like. The camera changes the shutter speed and exposes for the highlights and the shadows. I shoot in RAW for all my HDR. I want as much data to be made available for Photomatix Pro. More is better in this situation. After you create your HDR you can always delete the 9 RAW files. Or I like to keep one of the originals and keep the HDR – just for comparison.
Ok, so you have your exposures. Whether it is 3, 5, 7 or 9 you can use Photomatix Pro. It was THE program everyone recommends. I tried it out using the Trial version and got the hang of it and I did learn a lot of this from kelbytraining.com.
I launch Photomatix Pro and the following screenshots have red highlighting buttons I click or areas that are of interest. Other things are ignored. The photo will ultimately be processed again in Lightroom and Photoshop so don’t worry if the image doesn’t look perfect after Photomatix Pro does it’s work.
Just drag the RAW files to the the box and click OK. There are times where the computer is going to be thinking so hopefully you have an iPod to keep you entertained.
I leave most things in the default position. If your subject has people moving or objects that are moving like flags, foliage, water, and such you can tell Photomatix Pro here to watch for those and it will do a bit more magic on the photos. It isn’t perfect but it can help. It does take it a little longer but if you still have that iPod…
I also don’t want the software fiddling with the white balance or such – I fix that in Lightroom after the fact. But I do let the software use the ProPhoto RGB colorspace because I want lots of colors. I can always reduce the size of the file after. I also use a Drobo so I am not to concerned about disk space anymore. 
Once Photomatix Pro does it’s magic you get something like this. This look aweful! But this is a 32 bit file – I believe. And computer monitors can’t display an image with that much color data. Imagine trying to look at your wedding photos on a 1970′s style monitor that had ONE color.
So when you see this don’t worry just click the Tone Map button and you get to the fun part.
The Tone Map button – I made a screenshot!
Ok, this is the panel that lets you go crazy! You can crank the levers and knobs in all sorts of directions. You can get boring and you can get surreal and weird. It really is up to you. I have highlighted the basic sections that I will toy with. I always click default at the bottom of the dialogue – that is my starting point. On strength I rarely go above 85 – the higher you go the more surreal you get.
Light Smoothing – if you crank that to the left you get really weird halos. I usually leave it where it is – maybe go one click in either direction. When you are done – don’t worry – it looks rather unsaturated and lacking contrast. We will fix that in Lightroom. You could use the other sliders here but Lightroom and Photoshop do it better.
This is what the photo looks like after tone mapping. It looks sort of aweful. But we will add black and contrast and some curves in Lightroom.
If you aren’t using Lightroom – why not?! Hang your head in shame!
I import the photo in to Lightroom and process it as if it were a new photo. I usually do an Auto Tone and then fix it if the Auto Tone goes weird. But you can see already the photo is looking better.
Look at this – it is looking great – and it’ll look better in a minute or two.
Here are the slider setting for this particular image. You can see the histogram to see as well. The blacks for this photo are cranked all the way to 25! Since this is a landscape photo I introduced a lot of clarity – I love that feature. And I added vibrance. Don’t go to overboard on vibrance sometimes white clouds or white objects start turning blue.
And the final image I took into Photoshop and I edited the photo in LAB mode. If you aren’t familiar with this mode it is pretty dang cool.
Or if you want something easy I made a photoshop action that you can download and use. It takes the photo from RGB to LAB and creates some color curves to boost the saturation. It also boosts the brightness a little. I also have it create a little bit of sharpening. It does stop at one point to ask you to change the opacity of layers if the action went to far or if you want to paint out some changes. And then it completes by flattening the image and returning to RGB mode.
So that is my tutorial for HDR. I hope you enjoyed it and let me know if I went to quickly over some parts. This is my first time writing a tutorial.
This Tutorial is awesome – I am also testing the comment fields.
Have you shot pictures with a polarizing filter? You might be pleased with the results.
[...] at least 3 exposures in order to pick up detail in all tonal extremes. I used nine… Here is a great tutorial on the matter by dav. d [...]
Thanks for a great tutorial! Inspiring photography, as well!