HDR
By Alex Rumjancevs posted 21/04/08
HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and it is used whenever the scene you want to photograph contains a brightness range that’s beyond what your camera can capture in just one shot. HDR can enhance and improve your images, often adding drama and details.
To produce an HDR image you have to take enough separate exposures of the scene you are photographing. These shots have to be from exactly the same angle (use a tripod if possible) and they should be taken by varying the exposure time, not the aperture, because changing aperture also changes depth of field.
So once you have your shots taken, open them up in Photomatix Pro and under HDR menu option select Generate. That will then bring up the HDR image that should be enhanced further, so go to HDR and select Tone Mapping. From here it’s all in your hands, just play around with all sliders and see what difference that makes.
Once you are happy with the result, click OK and then File, Save As.
How does one make the picture prettier? Once you have your HDR file processed, you can enhance it using Photoshop - curves, levels, hue & saturation and all the other bits and pieces that you can imagine.
This HDR image was created from 4 shots with different exposures.
But, you can also experiment with a single image, just to add that drama effect to it.
Just open one image twice in Photomatix and generate HDR from it. You can get some interesting effects.
I use Photomatix Pro. If you don’t have the software then a trial version can be downloaded for free. The new "merge to HDR" feature of Photoshop CS2 and CS3 allows you to create HDR images as well.
Some other software can be downloaded on the internet (legally and for free): FDRTools Basic, HDRShop, hugin, Picturenaut, pfstools, Qtpfsgui.
Written by Picture This user Sasar (Alex Rumjancevs)
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adam.booth1984 said...
Posted on 23/04/2008 15:55
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judo-jule said...
Posted on 23/04/2008 16:06
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adam.booth1984 said...
Posted on 24/04/2008 16:03
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ymaltais1 said...
Posted on 02/09/2008 20:57
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