Nine to Five HDR

Posted by Philip in Photo Processing

When photographing for HDR images, it’s good to capture nine exposures at on stop apart like the following set of images from the Yadkin Arts Center.

Most people would just jump right on in and merge them all.  But I’ve almost never found a need to use all nine exposures.  Generally I haven’t had a need to use more than five exposures.  It’s not a case where it’ll always be the same set of exposures.  One would think you would always want the darkest and the lightest, but the reality is that you only use them in extreme cases, because these often inject the bulk of the noise in the image.  Below is my choices for this image.

I do start to see which image gives me the best highlights and best shadows, but you have to look across the images to see which ones show detail in various parts of the image.  I’ve circled the areas that most interested me.  Every major section of the image has to be taken into consideration.  I want to make sure I have enough detail when looking through the glass as well as the light fixtures under the roof.  The final merged photo has the best attributes of the sequence.

Read More

Original Location

Posted by Philip in Gallery

The little video I did of nine brackets on a three bracket camera was originally at a wonderfully decorated house for Halloween. But I had various sound issues as well as the street was much more busy than I thought it would be. But I did finish the image I wanted to make and wanted to share it. What do you think?

Read More

Hold really really still

Posted by Philip in Gallery, Photo Technique

Back in the ancient days of photography you had to hold really still for a basic exposure which was really long.  Then along came flash powder and then flash bulbs and eventually the wonderfully fast flash units.  But along comes a new technology and we are back to standing still… sort of.  HDR processing is still in its infancy and I expect that in a few years cameras will have an HDR mode that captures multiple exposures of the same instant. But until that day, the exposures are taken one after the other which has the issue of ghosting any movement when the images are combined.  So any movement has to be calculated out of the final image.  There are several ways to do this, but all require losing some of that extra exposure information you went through the trouble to get in the first place.  So if you want to HDR a person, they have to hold really still for a couple of seconds.

At a recent photography event I had the pleasure to work with Emily Darnell a professional model from West Virginia very briefly.  She can hold a pose extremely well, well enough where doing a HDR image of her was rather easy.  In fact I think I shook the camera more than she moved since I was using a monopod instead of a tripod.

Read More

And How about HDRtist?

Posted by Philip in Follow-up

If you don’t know if HDR is for you and want to try your hand (or photography) at it, you have the option of of your choice of various 30 day trials for plugins and software.  But if you are like me, sometimes you get distracted and those trials run out or you may not have the time to really vest yourself into a new technology.  So a free program for HDR photography like HDRtist by Ohanaware may be what you are looking for.  It’s simple… really simple.  Drop the photos on the app and you have a single strength slider to control the look.  It appears that it’s more than just exposure blending, so you can make your HDR anywhere from bland to really punchy.  But if you want something funky, you’ll have to blend images from different scenes.

Here’s where you come in: Give HDRtist a try and tell me what you think.  I’m not affiliated with them in any way, just curious if you think a single slider bar is enough, even for freeware.

Read More

HDR Photomatix and CS5 side-by-side

Posted by Philip in Photo Processing

This isn’t a huge in-depth comparison of the two products.  This past weekend I went to a car show and I did quite a number of handheld bracketed images so I could make some HDR photos.  Lately I’ve been using CS5 over Photomatix because I liked the results a bit better.  I wanted to see if that was justified so I processed the same set of images in both and did a split compare.

I tried to get the exact same look from each, but quickly realized that was a lost cause, so I did my best to balance the image in the same fashion with just a single HDR pass.  And here are my thoughts:

All in all I prefer CS5 final processed  image.  Even though the colors aren’t as rich as Photomatix, the noise reduction, ghost removal and reduced fringe coloring make it my choice for the moment.  I’m sure Photomatix will be coming out with a new version to address these issues and one up Adobe.  There is one case in which I’m using Photomatix over CS5 and that’s the batch processing.  When I’m doing real estate photos, I’ll have a set of a hundred bracketed images and need to combine those into HDR easily.

Is there a particular reason you use one product over the other?  I’d love to hear your thoughts as well.

Read More