Hello World! This Week: HDR Tutorial

Hello World! 

This blog will feature a new technique every week for the next few months or so on new techniques for digital photographers to consider when looking through their lenses. The techniques and their tutorials will cover not only the creation of new and interesting still images but also moving images aka videos as well. This is to provide the reader with a more rounded set of skills where photography is concerned by introducing some video content and to broaden their creative perspective by providing different angles to consider before depressing the shutter.

This Week: HDR

This week we will be covering the creation of HDR images. HDR stands for High-Dynamic Range and is a method to create images where there is a high range of luminosity (luminosity is the measure of brightness) between the light and dark areas of the image. It is used to create images that capture higher ranges of luminosity then what is usually capture in a single photograph. HDR photographs are known for sometimes appearing very surreal looking, depending on the photographer, and

Why?

Modern digital cameras while being increasingly sensitive to lower and lower levels of light suffer from the drawback that you can only expose for either the brighter or darker parts of an image. To create images that capture both the bright and dark ranges of a scene, you must create an HDR picture. 

What you will need

To create a successful HDR photograph you must have the following items:

• A Digital camera with manual or bracketing functions (preferably a DSLR) 

• A Computer (Mac or PC)

• Photoshop CS3 or above

• Tripod (optional) - if you are shooting at night, dusk, cloudy, or otherwise dark situations it will be best to mount your camera on the tripod to provide the same framing for the image three times over.

Pre-Processing/Shooting

Before we can roll up our sleeves and delve into any sort of photoshop or computer work, we have to capture the photographs we will be working with. So go out to explore and find a scene you where you can only expose for either the dark or the light parts of the image but would like to capture the detail and information of both ends of the range.

Manual Mode:

once you have your scene framed up, you will need to enter manual mode on your camera and expose for your scene. Take your first photo. Now set the aperture setting on your camera for two-three full stops lower than your initial settings. Take another photo. Now set your aperture setting for two-three stops higher than your initial settings.

It is worth noting you can also change your shutter speed in place of your aperture. However changing your aperture provides your with better contrast and color differences for exposure level.

Bracketing:

If you have a camera with the ability to bracket (which is just the automation of the process describe above) you can just set your initial exposure, turn on bracketing and then take your three photos.

Processing

Now that we have our three working images, we can fire up photoshop and begin the creation process.

Step 1.

Open Photoshop.

Step 2.

Open the three images you took on your camera in photoshop as separate images.

Step 3.

Now click on File in the menu bar and select automate and then "Merge to HDR Pro"

Step 4.

The following dialog box will open prompting you to make a few choices
now. You will notice you can actually add files from this box without opening the images first, which is handy, however its always good practice to learn the long way first. Now because we have our images already open in photoshop, go ahead and click "Add Open Files". Make sure the "Attempt to Automatically Align Sources Images" box at the bottom is checked. Click "Ok".

Step 5.

Photoshop will now take over with it's automation magic and begin to open each image into a layer in one file and begin to align them (this is really only pertinent if you took them without a tripod or moved the camera inbetween shots). Your computer if it does not have alot of RAM (working memory) might freeze up or take awhile longer then you think it should, but just hang on it will be worth it.

Step 6.

A new dialog box will open with your photo on the left and sliders to change values and subsequently change how your HDR is displayed. I would like to stress the importance of going to town and fiddling around with the sliders, to get the hang of how they affect your image. If at any time you feel you have gone too far with your editing click on one of the presets to reign in your image to something that looks like a traditional HDR image.

Step 7.

Now that you have selected how the output will look, click okay and let photoshop put the finishing touches on your photo.

Step 8.

Now that your image is ready to be exported to be shared online or printed and shown to the world, click "File" once again at the menubar and go to "Save As". Select .Jpg as your export format; JPEG or .JPG/.JPEG is the most widely accepted format nowadays.
Choose the location where you would like your picture to be saved and click save.

Next another dialog window will ask you to set some values for exporting the HDR as a JPEG. Crank the slider quality up to 12 (we all want to see it at it's best!) and choose progressive for a more optimized conversion.  Then hit "Ok"!

Step 9.

Share and Enjoy!!