Introduction to HDR
Yes. That title says it all. Right now I'm getting myself very much interested to do HDR photography. What is HDR? Well, it's an acronym which means High Dynamic Range photography. Most photographers who have been in the field for sometime may know about this. Anyway, since most of my photography friends have their own interest like doing landscape and portraiture photography, I want to learn to do HDR photography instead. Of course knowing how to do the basic thing is important.
What you need in order to do is to have a camera especially that has Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB) that can manage either 3 or 5 different exposure in order to blend them together. Having a tripod also is very important so you can eliminate camera shake like shaky hands or wind blowing your camera. Having a remote release is also important but its optional unless you want to use the self-timer on your camera. So basically, you need a camera with AEB function, a good tripod and a remote release (I seldom use unless it gets really shaky).
The next thing is you need a good software to combine all the different exposure. The software that I used in all my HDR photos is Photomatix and Photoshop CS. What I learn is that the best photo type is to use RAW since you can maintain all the details in the photo. So you can either convert them in Lightroom (export into JPEGs) or Photoshop (File>Script>Image Processor) after that. However, merging the RAW photos in Photomatix is also possible if you are lazy to get them converted first.
In Photomatix you pretty much load all the bracketed photos and do all the settings you need. When you are done, you just click the Process button and you'll get yourself a HDR photo. However, in order to make it look much better use Photoshop to adjust the photo again in which you can adjust the Levels and Curves, exposure correction, dodging and burning, sharpening, etc. I usually just use Levels and Curves to make it look nice and change the Hue and Saturation if the photo looks either dull or too saturated. I'm also using a filter called Topaz Adjust which you can use to adjust the photo to make it more surreal or natural. Also this software has the HDR presets which you can apply to a single photo. Of course all the mentioned software are quite expensive.
All of this information I learned it from Trey Radcliff. Check is website at http://www.stuckincustoms.com/.
You can check out his tutorial guidelines in http://www.stuckincustoms.com/hdr-tutorial. He sure is my guru when it comes to HDR photography.
Some of the photos I took and made them into HDR. Some of the photos I used to post them before.
The photo below was my very first attempt on HDR. But as you can see, the sky are not that nice (I guess).
What you need in order to do is to have a camera especially that has Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB) that can manage either 3 or 5 different exposure in order to blend them together. Having a tripod also is very important so you can eliminate camera shake like shaky hands or wind blowing your camera. Having a remote release is also important but its optional unless you want to use the self-timer on your camera. So basically, you need a camera with AEB function, a good tripod and a remote release (I seldom use unless it gets really shaky).
The next thing is you need a good software to combine all the different exposure. The software that I used in all my HDR photos is Photomatix and Photoshop CS. What I learn is that the best photo type is to use RAW since you can maintain all the details in the photo. So you can either convert them in Lightroom (export into JPEGs) or Photoshop (File>Script>Image Processor) after that. However, merging the RAW photos in Photomatix is also possible if you are lazy to get them converted first.
In Photomatix you pretty much load all the bracketed photos and do all the settings you need. When you are done, you just click the Process button and you'll get yourself a HDR photo. However, in order to make it look much better use Photoshop to adjust the photo again in which you can adjust the Levels and Curves, exposure correction, dodging and burning, sharpening, etc. I usually just use Levels and Curves to make it look nice and change the Hue and Saturation if the photo looks either dull or too saturated. I'm also using a filter called Topaz Adjust which you can use to adjust the photo to make it more surreal or natural. Also this software has the HDR presets which you can apply to a single photo. Of course all the mentioned software are quite expensive.
All of this information I learned it from Trey Radcliff. Check is website at http://www.stuckincustoms.com/.
You can check out his tutorial guidelines in http://www.stuckincustoms.com/hdr-tutorial. He sure is my guru when it comes to HDR photography.
Some of the photos I took and made them into HDR. Some of the photos I used to post them before.
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