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One more from the Mt. Baker trip.
This was shot from the driveway of our condo, the morning we left.
HDR built from a bracket of 9 exposures, 1 stop apart from each other. Hand-held, by the way. There's this myth that the only way to build an HDR is to use a tripod. I grant a tripod can make your HDRs better and make the process work more reliably, but if you're in a pinch don't be afraid to try to hand-hold the camera.
This was shot from the driveway of our condo, the morning we left.
HDR built from a bracket of 9 exposures, 1 stop apart from each other. Hand-held, by the way. There's this myth that the only way to build an HDR is to use a tripod. I grant a tripod can make your HDRs better and make the process work more reliably, but if you're in a pinch don't be afraid to try to hand-hold the camera.
Category Photography / Scenery
Species Unspecified / Any
Size 571 x 800px
File Size 252.3 kB
I sometimes manually brush together different exposures of the same frame. Most of the time I'm doing that to add in strobes in more locations than I own strobes though. :)
This, and my usual HDR approach, is a combination of Lightroom 3, Photoshop CS3, and Photomatix Pro.
My steps:
0. I usually start with 9 frames, the most my camera can auto-bracket. The most common mistake I've made is not allowing enough range in the exposure bracket. You need some shots that have absolutely no blown out highlights at all -- no blinkies on the camera's LCD (you do have blinkies turned on, right?). Even small little blown out highlights can cause nasty artifacts in the HDR.
1. Use Lightroom to set a uniform white balance and development settings on all frames. I set black clipping to 0, contrast to something low, tone curve to linear, etc., etc., to try to bring out as much raw numeric detail in the image as possible.
2. Load all images into layers in Photoshop. Align layers. Save back out as separate files.
3. Use Photomatix Pro to build an HDR and do basic tone curve on it. I've found the less I have Photomatix do beyond a few basic steps, the better I like it. I let it reduce ghosting artifacts (common for me since I do often hand-hold my HDRs), but all its other things like aligning and noise reducing and such I leave turned off. In tone curve mode, I usually touch the strength, luminosity, micro-contrast, and gamma, and leave most everything else alone. Smoothing on maximum.
4. I bring the developed image back into Lightroom or Photoshop and tweak white balance and tone curves till I'm happy with it.
This, and my usual HDR approach, is a combination of Lightroom 3, Photoshop CS3, and Photomatix Pro.
My steps:
0. I usually start with 9 frames, the most my camera can auto-bracket. The most common mistake I've made is not allowing enough range in the exposure bracket. You need some shots that have absolutely no blown out highlights at all -- no blinkies on the camera's LCD (you do have blinkies turned on, right?). Even small little blown out highlights can cause nasty artifacts in the HDR.
1. Use Lightroom to set a uniform white balance and development settings on all frames. I set black clipping to 0, contrast to something low, tone curve to linear, etc., etc., to try to bring out as much raw numeric detail in the image as possible.
2. Load all images into layers in Photoshop. Align layers. Save back out as separate files.
3. Use Photomatix Pro to build an HDR and do basic tone curve on it. I've found the less I have Photomatix do beyond a few basic steps, the better I like it. I let it reduce ghosting artifacts (common for me since I do often hand-hold my HDRs), but all its other things like aligning and noise reducing and such I leave turned off. In tone curve mode, I usually touch the strength, luminosity, micro-contrast, and gamma, and leave most everything else alone. Smoothing on maximum.
4. I bring the developed image back into Lightroom or Photoshop and tweak white balance and tone curves till I'm happy with it.
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