HDR photography, mastering the technique

HDR is currently one of the most popular techniques among photographers and art enthusiasts, it’s a captivating technique that allows people to make things beyond reality, creating something that we could probably call hyper-reality. On this tutorial we’re going to show you the secrets behind the creation of HDR pictures, from shooting the pictures to Photoshop, this tutorial will give you everything you need to master this technique.

Ingredients

• Digital camera (professional D-SLR cameras work best but your occasional pocket camera works just fine).
• Photomatix Pro.
• Adobe Photoshop CS4+ (CS3 and older versions might work but we’re not sure about that).
• Topaz Labs plug-in

Note: If you’re a photography fan and you don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars purchasing these 4 ingredients, you can utilize Gimp, the online alternative to Photoshop. The results will not be as great as this tutorial will show you but you can still achieve some pretty cool things.

The first thing you need to know is how the HDR technique works. According to Wikipedia, High Dynamic Range Imaging is a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminance between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than current standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods. This wide dynamic range allows HDR images to more accurately represent the range of intensity levels found in real scenes, ranging from direct sunlight to faint starlight.

Bracketing

OK folks, it’s time to begin this plate, the first thing you need to do is grab your digital camera and decide what’s going to be your first HDR experiment. Usually any kind of picture works for HDR, though we consider that this effect should not be applied on human pictures as they make them look excessively artificial. We call bracketing to the process of taking the same picture using different camera values, this is useful for combining different focus points and generate high depth of field photos or like this case, for creating HDR photographs. Once you have grabbed your camera, you must take 3 different pictures that are going to help you make the HDR effect, these three pictures are 1 underexposed, 1 properly exposed and 1 overexposed take of the same scene.

If you have a professional D-SLR, those cameras usually came with an auto-bracketing mode, just use that option and the camera will obtain the three pictures automatically, but in case that you don’t have that option available, you can manually adjust your camera’s exposure to take these 3 pictures, we suggest you to use a tripod for shooting the photos to make them look as equal as possible in terms of framing. Once you’re satisfied with the photographs, save them in your disk so we can proceed with the next step of the tutorial.

Photomatix

The next ingredient for preparing our HDR soup is Photomatix Pro, this is an awesome photography program that’s been specially designed to generate HDR images, you can download a free trial version of Photomatix and then decide if you should purchase a license. This program is really easy to work with, you just have to import the files and he’ll generate the HDR image instantly, though in this case we’re going to make some manual adjustments.

Once you tell the program to import the pictures, a new window will show up where you should adjust it just like the following picture shows:

This configuration works for most pictures, though you can change some things such as activating the ‘reduce ghosting artifacts’ option in case that your sister’s hand has appeared in one of the takes. Once you have this ready, hit OK and the first version of your HDR image will show up.

This is the first version of your HDR picture, in case that you’re only looking to correct some exposure issues you can stop right here and save your image, but in case that you’re looking for a more powerful HDR effect, then there’s still some things to do. As you can see, a small window named ‘Preset Thumbnails’ appears next to your processed image, you can check the different variations and see if there’s one that looks better than the current result. Now what we’re going to do is a ‘Tone Mapping’ process to adjust the picture according to our own criteria.

Once the tone mapping process is ready, you can already say that you officially have a HDR photo, however, we know that you’re looking for those high contrast pictures that you find when Googling HDR. Hit the Process button and save your picture as a Tiff file before we proceed with the next part of the tutorial.

Moving on to Photoshop

A while ago we discovered an amazing Photoshop plugin named Topaz. This plugin is an incredible addition that enhances the power of Photoshop enormously, you can download a free trial version of Topaz to continue with our tutorial. After you’ve installed the plugin, open the .tiff file of your processed picture and create a duplicate layer.

OK, in case that for X or Y reason you haven’t been able to download the Topaz plugin, there’s a Photoshop-only option that can give you a similar result, we’re going to explain both methods, first let’s see how things work without Topaz.

Method # 1: Photoshop HDR method

Since the CS5 version, Photoshop has incorporated a new option to help you generate HDR photographs and is with this option that we’re going to work right now, select the duplicate layer and go to Image>Adjustments>HDR Toning. Unfortunately, this process requires all layers to be flattened, thus you’ll have to do this in a copy version of this file and then drag the resulting image to the original.

Great, now select the ‘Photorealistic High Contrast’ preset and without making any further changes hit OK, then drag this layer and place it on top of the original .tiff file that we’ve obtained from Photomatix.

Then switch the blending mode to Luminosity and reduce the opacity value around 57 %, this will maintain the shadows and lights but will remove all the excesses.

And that’s how you can proceed in case that you’re not able to install the Topaz plugin, however, in case that you have managed to download the plugin, this is what you need to do:

Method # 2: Using Topaz

As we said before, Topaz is an impressive plugin that adds some pretty cool features to Photoshop, what we’re going to do next is utilize Topaz Adjust, you can find it at Filter>Topaz Labs>Topaz Adjust 4.

Topaz opens a window similar to the regular ‘Filters’ window, what we you must look for is the ‘Spicify’ option, select it and do not change any other thing unless you want to get a little experimental.

And just like we did on the previous method, reduce the layer’s opacity to somewhere around 57 % and switch the blending mode to luminosity. Now let’s see how both methods look:

As you can see, using the Photoshop HDR methods creates more contrast between lights and shadows, while Topaz creates smoother tones, anyway, both methods look really great and can help you make your HDR pictures. As you can see, there are some regions on the picture that are still underexposed and there are also some ‘halos’ around certain parts of the picture, to correct this we’re going to make use of the ‘Dodge’ and ‘Burn’ tools, Burn will help us remove the halo and Dodge will help us correct the underexposed zones.

Final touches

Now we have reached the final part of this tutorial. Many artists leave their HDR pictures just like we showed you before, this is an additional step that not everybody knows about, so please keep the secret for yourself hahaha. Select the ‘Burn’ tool and adjust its values to Shadows range, Exposure around 17 % and check the Protect Tones option, if you don’t check this option the Burn tool will act like a simple black brush, we also suggest you to use a soft brush to make the adjustments as soft as possible.

Select the original layer, we don’t want to alter the duplicate layer where we applied the Topaz / HDR effect. Now pass the Burn tool over all the ‘halos’ to reduce that weird glow that the average HDR photographs usually have, don’t overdo this part because you will end messing up the picture.

On this photograph we have passed the Burn tool over the highlighted areas, this helped us reduce some chromatic aberrations and give the picture a more natural aspect. Now let’s grab the Dodge tool and adjust the Range to Midtones, increase the Exposure value to 22 %, check the Protect Tones option and select a smooth brush to make the adjustments look smoother.

This works just like the Burn tool, pass the brush over the underexposed areas, use this tool carefully because an excessively bright element next to a shadow will look odd.

We have passed the Dodge tool over the highlighted parts on the previous picture. As you can see we’ve managed to rescue the giraffe sculpture that was looking very dark before, also the little Chinese ornament has been highlighted. Now our HDR photograph has been completed and is ready to be shown to all our friends, let’s see how it looks:

That’s it, now you know all the ingredients and how to mix them to create an astonishing HDR picture, of course you can experiment and try other filters and plugins but in essence this is how HDR works, we hope this tutorial has been helpful for you, don’t forget to leave us your comments and share it with your friends, thanks for stopping by.