HDR - try it out!

[popeshawnpaul]

Elkman's winning december photo got me thinking about a post on HDR.  I think it's time for some of you to try this exciting technique.  While it may look funny at first, I think you'll realize that having a high dynamic range in a photo is more like your eye perceives the subject when you are shooting it.  In essence, you bracket three photos...one with correct exposure, one underexposed, and one overexposed.  The correct exposure provides detail in the mid tones, while the overexposed photo provides the details in the shadows, and the underexposed photo provides the detail in the sky.  When combined, everything is visible in the final photo.  Software such as newer versions of Photoshop do HDR, as well as standalone products like the one Elkman uses.  This is an exciting form of photography that I believe will become standard as a feature automaticaly in future cameras.  I have been experimenting with HDR for about a year and have a long way to do.  I'm trying to take this technique to wildlife photography as much as possible.  So lets see your HDR photos.  If you don't have the softwrae, maybe we can find a free product or you can email me your three photos and I'll try to combine them as well as Elkman does.  Here is my HDR photo that I recently did while shooting in Seattle during a lunch break.  

[Coasthunterjay]

You must be some kind of genious? 

no just joking, good info man, thanks.

That will help. i take alot of pictures and i use a Canon rebel SLR camera with 35mm film most the time and can use this. Im old fashion but tke good pictures........

[jackelope]

pope...best to use on landscape shots?
that seattle shot is cool.
i'll get 3 and try it.

[Elkman]

Not just landscape, you can do anything that has a high contrast ratio.
Paul, if you shot one of those 3 images with the city any brighter, you might want to work more towards light side to get more detail in the darks, just a suggestion.
Did you use PS?

I shot this the other day at the court house.

[jackelope]

do i have to take 3 different pic's or can i over/under expose for 2  in PS and use them that way?

[Elkman]

do i have to take 3 different pic's or can i over/under expose for 2  in PS and use them that way?

You can, but the over/under unless done with RAW might have to much noise, depending on the image.
Because when you do an exposure adjustment with a .jpg, it's not a true representation of exposure adjustment, so you will pick up some artifacts. I have only tried it once, and got bad results, but since I have the HDR software, I just do it with that and 3 separate images.

[jackelope]

thanks elkman...i sent you a pm.

[popeshawnpaul]

Yeah Jackelope, it works well for landscape photos because you are using a tripod and the subject can't move in between shots.  However, I must admit I'm experimenting with this technique on shooting deer and rams.  Quite often the deer or animal is standing motionless.  It would make for some great photos when it does turn out.  And although you can just take one picture in RAW and create the three images, I just use the bracket feature on my camera.  I think you get better quality that way. 

I did that one in PS Elkman.  I think your software can do a better job of combining them.  I must admit though, I kind of purposely kept the city buildings and foreground dark to try and emphasize the sky and backlighting a bit more.  Not sure if that was the smartest thing to do but it looked ok at the time.

Anyone else got one or want to try? 

shawn

P.S.-For those of you thinking you need some fancy camera it's not true.  I did this technique with my wife's Canon Elph point and shoot.  I pointed the camera at the sky and locked the exposure.  I then recomposed and shot the overexposed frame.  I then pointed the camera at the dark shadows in the trees and locked exposure.  I then recomposed and shot the underexposed picture.  I then just shot a regular picture of the scene.  I would then combine the photos and had some good results doing it that way.  I didn't even use a tripod...

[jackelope]

I just use the bracket feature on my camera.  I think you get better quality that way. 

P.S.-For those of you thinking you need some fancy camera it's not true

my little fz18 will do that. i'll try it.
it has a bracket mode where it will automatically take 1 with the correct setting, 1 under and 1 over-exposed.
now i'm gonna play this weekend and see what i can come up with.

[popeshawnpaul]

If it will go +2 and -2 even better...some have that feature.  Try and shoot raw if it allows.  Then you could take the -1 if it only goes that far and underexpose it in your raw editor and vise versa with the +1. 

shawn

[jackelope]

Try and shoot raw if it allows

it does...and i will

[Muleyslyr]

Wow.....that's weird.  I wondered how the heck he did that.  That light is pretty wicked too.  Almost looks like it's on fire.  Does it work well with harvest photos?  Has anyone tried??

[popeshawnpaul]

It works well with photos that have a large dynamic range.  What I mean is when the sky is bright and there are shadows in the photo.  If you are just shooting an all midtone green leaf with no light and dark in the photo, I don't hink HDR does you much good.  I think the perfect uses for this would be deer skyline shots if they hold still for the three photos.  My camera will shoot 3 pictures in like a half a second so you don't need them to stand still for long.  Harvest photos would work for this but you have to hold still while your buddy shoots the three photos. 

Some people will say the photo doesn't look natural.  My comment has always been that it's more natural to what your eye sees.  The picture above is exactly like how my eye perceived Seattle on that day.  I just don't think we are use to seeing a photo that contains such a large dynamic range so it doesn't look natural compared to the photos we normally see.  I don't know if you Seattlites remembe that day, but it was a Thursday just before the snow storm day a couple weeks ago.  The light was crazy that day so I ran up to the park to shoot it. 

You can photoshop stuff all you want, but if you don't have good light you don't have a great picture.  I think only 1 out of 30 days I see light that dynamic in Seattle.  You have to be willing to drop what your doing and take advantage of it when it happens.  I always carry my tripod and camera in my car for this reason.  Who knows, I might be driving to court in Enumclaw when Mt. Rainier has an amazing ray of light on it with a dark cloud above...  Or, like Elkman encoutered, he was driving over Chinook to go hunting and saw an amazing light opportunity and probably pulled his car over.  He expected that could happen so he had his camera with him.  I guess I learned to always have my camera on me back in my photojournalist newspaper photography days.  You never know when opportunity will arise.

If someone needs some resources on how to combine the images in an effective manner, Elkman posted a couple great links in the December photo of the month topic.  If you can't find the links maybe we can post them again.  There are a few tricks to help with putting the pictures together.  I still consider myself a novice at that process.

shawn

[robodad]

Ok I have tried to get my photos to turn out like these others but I guess my picture taking ability is bad bad.

I downloaded the trial versions of the Photomatix Pro and the plugin, the question I have is which adjustments do you make and how much.  I will get some decent pics tomorrow when it is daylight to try but I don't know how much to adjust each of the sliders.

BTW I am not a photographer and know very little about it but i am impressed with the pics i see on here and want to learn how to do it !!

Thanks for the information.

Allen...

[popeshawnpaul]

You know Allen, I don't honestly know.  I use photoshop and after the photo is complete, I go to change the bit size and a screen pops up allowing to to adjust the curves and such.  I just play with them until I like the result.  Hopefully Elkman can chime in on a good process to do it.  I know he posted a link to some web pages that show how to do it step by step to get good results.  I suggest following his links and try them if you aren't using Photoshop.  For those of you using Photoshop if you want me to link to a good writeup on how to do it I can do that if needed...

shawn

[Elkman]

In Photomatric open the 3 pictures by going HDR, Generate, choose the pics, and by the way, some times I do 9 exposures, but 3 work great.
Then when it's done with that process it will look dark and nasty. then go HDR tone mapping and a set of controls will open on the left side.
There is NO rule for those adjustments, as they will be different for each image.
I usually start with the Light smoothing positions, click on the extreme left then right to see the range, try starting in the middle then adjust the ones above it like strength first then saturation. Like I said there is no set rule, just run them all thru there extreme positions to see the changes that they do to the image and you'll get the hang of it like i did. GAmma is a good control slider also, and I usually end up around 1.00-1.20
Some times I spend and hr on 1 picture even before the final tweak in PS.

Oh and here are those links to much better tutorials then the one i just tried to write


Here how its done.
http://flyingpanther.wordpress.com/hdr-tutorial/

http://www.free-css-templates.com/photoshop-webdesign-tutorials/the-best-hdr-tutorials/


Here's what I use.
http://www.hdrsoft.com/

Here is another example of one I did in Tacoma Last week, the original image is on the Left with the blown out sky, and it gone thru HDR process on the right.

Have fun!


 

[Elkman]

Oh, and by the way, this is what I look like for those of you that want to know who your talking to. 

Self Portrait.

[robodad]

I don't see you just a pair of eyeballs and a bow !!

Thanks again for the information, I will give it another shot, maybe I need to start out with a better picture, not sure what settings I started with but I'll play with it.

Allen...

[Elkman]

Ya know, If you go to the flying panther site, you can left click on the 3 different pics of the rocks at Joshua tree and when they come up full size you can right click and save them separately to your desktop and use them to play with to get the hang of the program.

[MuleySniper]

So if you are using three separate pics, are you just layering them and then flattening the image? Paul said he just uses PS to tweak the levels to get the look he wants. Is there any other software for combining the three pics? Im familiar with the full versions of PS, but the hard drive on my other Mac went out about 2 months ago and unfortunately it had my hacked version of PS I need to find that disk! I really like the effect that produces. Thanks for the tips.
MS

[MuleySniper]

Sorry, I didnt see the links posted like 5 posts up!! I'll check em out.
MS

[quacker whacker]

this sounds pretty interesting, i dont have the software yet but i would like to start taking pictures and saving them and maybe doing them later. i dont know a lot about taking under/over exsposed pictures. could some one walk me through that process and settings, thanks.

[popeshawnpaul]

You need to first look and see if your camera has a feature called auto bracketing or exposure bracketing.  If it does, I simply shoot three images with that feature.  One with exposure right on, One at -2, and one at +2 (my camera only brackets up to +/-2).  While some suggest to take as many as 5 different exposures, I find that three in the +/-2 range works fine for most subjects.  If you have a point and shoot or your camera does not have an exposure bracket feature, you can manually adjust your exposure after taking your first photo to over and under-expose your next two shots.  Here is an example from my Seattle shooting:

I take the first one correct exposure according to my in camera exposure meter.  While an ok picture, I wanted to see in the shadows a bit more and try and capture the light of the sky I was seeing a bit better.


So I took two more shots using my auto exposure bracketing.  See how the sky is blown out but the details of the sity buildings are shown better.  This is the overexposed +2 picture:


Here is the -2 underexposed shot.  This shot is mainly for just the sky.  Now the sky shows all the detail I saw when I took the picture but the city has become a silouette. 


And finally, here is the merged HDR photo.  I could have made the city shadows a bit more visible but my goal with this photo was to focus on the rays of light coming down to the water.  That was very visible in person and striking, but just did not show up on my single photos I was taking of the scene.  The other thing that my single pictures were failing to bring out was the orange glow behind the city as the sky down by Mt. Rainier was sunny and orange colored that day.  The light that day tended to wash out the colors on the single photos I was taking.  With HDR and a bump up in the saturation, I was able to bring the colors back to what I remember them being that day.  A quick sharpen in unsharp mask and a crop and I was done.  Took about 5 minutes to do it.  Additionally, the ferry provided a challenge.  Because it was moving, the ferry ended up being slightly blurry in the final HDR image.  I did need to go in and individually sharpen it.  I would like to see what Elkman could do with his dedicated HDR software and one of these image sequences.  Maybe I'll buy the software some day, who knows.

[MuleySniper]

I looked at my camera and I can change the exposure settings to both -2 and +2, but I dont think I can take them in succession. Is it possible to set up a tripod and take three pictures separately, changing the settings between each shot?
Thanks.
MS

[Antlershed]

How do I go about messing with the exposure in Photoshop? I would like to try this with one of my pics, but I only have one version. I also downloaded the free version of photomatrix pro.

[Elkman]

This is what I came up with.
Now in Photomatrix you have a lot of latitude in color and brightness and shadows and so forth.
this is just the way I like it and my interpretation as I did not see the live look of the shot.

[Elkman]

I looked at my camera and I can change the exposure settings to both -2 and +2, but I dont think I can take them in succession. Is it possible to set up a tripod and take three pictures separately, changing the settings between each shot?
Thanks.
MS

Yes, just set it in manual, set the aperture to like around 5.6 then set the shutter to what ever would make the correct exposure, shoot it, then adjust -2 down and shoot then +2 and shoot it. make the exposure change with the shutter not the aperture.
TA DA.

[Elkman]

How do I go about messing with the exposure in Photoshop? I would like to try this with one of my pics, but I only have one version. I also downloaded the free version of photomatrix pro.

Try Image, adjustment, levels. you'll see the 3 little triangle sliders under the histagram bar graph, slide them to see the changes.

right side is brights, left side is the blacks and center is the middle range.

[Antlershed]

Thanks. Here's one I did real quick. I guess the free version lays their name across the photo...

[popeshawnpaul]

Wow, I'm  going to have to get Photomatrix.  PS will do it but I can see I have nowhere the control you do with that Elkman.  Looks great.