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HDR Tutorial - Part 1: High Noon Light

What’s the worst time for photography?

Yes, around Noon on a Summer Day, but isn’t that also the time when you are most likely out for a walk with your family. I think I have a recipe for improving high noon photography and the recipe has one important ingredient: HDR.

Step 1: Shooting

I shot following picture – without a tripod – on a partly cloudy but sunny day in August at 2pm and as you can see, it came out rather underexposed and flat mostly because around 2/3 of the composition shows a rather bright sky that fooled the cameras metering system.

Exif Info:
  • Exposure Program: Aperture Priority
  • Shutter speed: 1/200
  • Aperture: f/11
  • Exposure Bias: 0 EV
  • Metering Mode: Center-weighted average
  • ISO: 200
  • Focal length: 65mm (full-frame body)
  • Lens: Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM

Overexposing the image by 1 stop would not have been enough to get back all details in the shadows and going over 1 stop would have blown out the highlights in the clouds – yes, I know I cold have used a ND grad filter to darken the sky area but I don’t want to carry them with me all the time and you don’t always have a nice clear line between the bright and the shadow parts of your composition. This is not even a very extreme example as the Sun was slightly covered by thin layers of clouds.

I therefore shot a total of 3 exposures at -2EV, 0EV and +2EV using the auto-bracketing mode in Aperture Priority.

Check out hdr-phototgraphy.com If you want to know more about the exposure bracketing function in your camera.

Note: Given the underexposed 0EV, I should have done an exposure compensation of around +1 stop but as my family was already “running” away from me, I didn’t have the time (happens all the time, btw :) ).

Step 2: Bring them into Lightroom

Adobe Lightroom 3 (LR3) is my tool of choice for managing all my pictures and I also do most of my editing in there. Part of my import process of my RAW files into LR3 is to convert them into DNG. There are many reason for doing this but my main reason is to save on storage space. I then do slight adjustments to the images like fixing the white-balance, remove Chromatic Aberrations or remove sensor dust if required. That was not needed for those images (that’s what I thought – but more to that later).

Step 3: Bring them into Photomatix Pro

There are many different HDR processing tools on the market but Photomatix Pro by HDRSoft is still my preferred method although I also like Nik’s HDR Efex Pro for which I’m also a Beta Tester.

Photomatix provides plug-in’s for all major Photo Managing/Editing programs like Lightroom, Aperture and Photoshop. I do not follow Trey Ratcliff with his suggestion to convert the RAW files into JPG before bringing them into Photomatix. I use the LR3 Photomatix Plugin by marking the 3 pictures, right-click and choose: “Edit in Photomatix Pro”:

This will convert the RAW files into TIFF’s using Lightroom – not Photomatix – which is the method HDRSoft endorses in their FAQ’s and I trust Lightroom to do a good job plus it’s much simpler and takes less time.

Next, you will get a few pop-up windows asking you strange questions – don’t worry – just choose the options as shown below and click through them:


Next pop-up is the “Preprocessing Options” window. This is also a point where my tutorial differs from Trey’s. I always choose the ‘crop ‘ option as I don’t want to end up with those ugly borders around the image. I do not choose the Anti-Ghosting and Noise-reduction option – we can do that better than Photomatix. I usually choose the “Reduce Chromatic Aberrations” option even though I try to fix it in LR3 beforehand but in case I forget, it does a quite good job.

You will then see your final image. Isn’t that amazing?

Well, that’s not really your final image but rather the 32-bit HDR that your monitor cannot display properly. But it will tell you if you missed any sensor-dust spots that you intended to remove in step 1 – like I did.

Assuming you did a better job than I did, disregard that ugly picture and click on “Tone Mapping / Fusion” on the Workflow Shortcuts Dialog:

Ok, this will give you a preview of a tonemapped version of the 32-bit HDR image and lots of options to screw it up. I usually start with the default settings that look like this for this particular image;

 

 

 

If you go crazy like many do, you can create a beauty like this with just one click on the “Enhancer – Grunge” preset:

This is what I call the “Flickr HDR look” – just search for HDR on Flickr and you know what I mean.

Going back to the default preset, I made a few slider adjustments to prevent blown-out highlights – sometimes they’re not easy to remove but we can still fix that later. Keep the saturation slider at the default settings as we don’t want to over-saturated the picture – we can still do that later in Photoshop or LR3 if we wish to.
Here is what I changed resulting in following preview:

 

 

 

When you’re happy with the preview, click on process on the Adustments dialog box and the magic will happen: Another preview. Click on the Red button on the top left corner to close the image and a new dialog box will appear to asking whether you want to save the picture – of course you do. A new Save dialog appears asking you where to save the picture. I always save it to the same location where my original RAW files are located and choose to open the image with my tool of choice – LR3:

You will now get the import dialog in LR3 that will let you get the tone-mapped image into your library.

This is the place where most HDR tutorials end but we’re just starting now. I – on purpose – chose an image without ghosting issues but Trey Ratcliff covers this extensively in part 3 of his tutorial.
. I will cover this part in a separate tutorial because I have a slightly different approach than Trey.

One thing I do not like at all is clipping highlights in bright clouds and as a coincidence we are experiencing exactly that problem with our HDR image:

Step 4: Time for some Photoshop fun

In order to fix the clipping you should not only open the HDR image in Photoshop but also the 0EV version that has no blown highlights in the bright clouds.
Mark those 2 pictures in LR3, right click and choose “Edit in” and “Open as Layers in Photoshop”. This will automatically open the 2 pictures in Photoshop and creates 2 layers to work with.

You might end up with 2 layers that are not perfectly aligned. You can either use the “Auto-Align Layers” option in the “Edit” menu or do it manually. I do it manually – just because I can and I like to be in control!

The easiest way to align two layers is to reduce the opacity of the top-layer to around 60% and then find a good spot and align the 2 layers using the move tool (V).

Before alignment

After alignment

Increase the opacity again to 100%, ensure that the HDR image is the background layer with the 0EV on top. Add a layer-mask to the top-layer and change its color to black by pressing Command-Delete.

Click into the newly created layer-mask and press B to select the Brush-tool. Make sure you’re painting with white (press D for default and X to switch to white) and reduce the opacity of the brush to around 25%. Then paint the blown-out areas with black so the underlying layer shows through.

After fixing the blown highlights you can flatten the image by going to the “Layers” menu and choose “Flatten Layers”.

The next step is to take care of the blacks because they are currently non-existent and that’s not good – I call it the “Lack of Black”. There are many ways to do that but my preferred method is to use Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2 (SEP2) – their Black and White conversion tool. You can achieve similar results using the regular “Black and White” conversion tool in Photoshop but I prefer the SEP2 plugin as it provides me much more control.

Start the Silver Efex Pro plugin in the “Filter” menu, “Nik Software” and choose “Silver Efex Pro 2″. It will start up the SEP2 interface and you will see a preview of your image in black and white using the default settings.

default settings in SEP2

adjusted settings in SEP2:
you can really change the look of your picture with the sliders in SEP2. For landscape shots like this I tend to use the red filter to darken the sky and the greens in the trees. I’m also boosting the contrast quite a lot as the processed Photomatix pictures tend to be rather flat. Adding more structure can provide your picture the “painterly effect” so don’t overdo it. There are many more possibilities with this plugin that I will cover in detail in a future tutorial.

Click the OK button and you will get a new black and white layer on top of the original color version.

In order to get the color back I choose one of the following blending modes in the layer palette. There are 4 different blending modes that work for a picture like this:

Luminosity

Overlay

Soft Light

Hard Light

It really depends on the image but I tend to go with the “Luminosity” blending option most of the time as it is the most saddle. I can still increase the contrast or the black once I bring the picture back to Lightroom.

Step 5: Enough of Photoshop, back to Lightroom for some final touches

You can see all adjustments made to get the final version in the history column. One point to mention is the graduated filter I added to darken the grass in the foreground.

Step 6: We are done!

Before:

After:

Summary of Software used in this tutorial