Category Archives: HDR Quick Tip

HDR does not = Light

By Peter | Published February 20, 2013

We get caught up sometimes thinking HDR is the cure all to everything. No matter the situation, shooting HDR will make it all better. But it simply does not. HDR allows you to capture the light our eyes can see and possibly our cameras can’t but it does not turn bad light to good.

This was hammered back in my head once again two weeks ago as I was out in Joshua Tree NP on a shoot. A friends I was traveling with called me over to see an area he was looking over down into the valley. It was a beautiful scene in front of me, but quite honestly the light sucked. It was an hour too late to shoot that area and no good light was getting down into the rock outcroppings, just a small area of great golden hour light was hitting the peak of one of those rock formations.

I took the shot more to appease my friend but thought well maybe something will come out of this. Measuring the light hitting that peak and then down into the crevasse below, it said there was a need for HDR so I did shoot a 7/1EV shot exposure and then went back to shooting my main subject that was loosing great light quickly the Natural Arch of Joshua Tree…and I think I was too late at that point

Getting back to base that night, I downloaded my cards and started culling through the shots of the day and I stopped at the above shot and thought I would see if maybe magically something would come of the image. I loaded the 7 Exposures from Lightroom into Nik HDR Efex Pro 2 and went about my normal procedures…and ,,,Meh, Nothing, It’s just a nothing shot. There’s some nice light on the peak to the left and a deep blue sky but everything in between is just flat nothing light. HDR captured it all perfectly but it was still bad boring nothing light.

Contrast that with a scene two days later when shooting the WindCaves of the Anza-Borrego desert where I had beautiful late day sun streaming into one of the caves and I used a 3/2EV Shot to capture that light inside the cave and also daylight outside the cave. All beautiful light and I used HDR as a tool to capture that. HDR did not make the light, it only made it possible to capture its range and with that…the beauty.

3 Exposures +- 2EV processed with Nik HDR Efex Pro 2

We can never forget that regardless of the tools we use, great photography still relies on certain principles…Number one; Great Light and Shadow

Hope that helps,
PT

Also posted in HDR Editorial, HDR Example, Photography Lesson | Tagged Great Light | 1 Comment

5 Quick Steps to better HDRs – Step 5

By Peter | Published January 31, 2013

5 Quick Steps to Better HDRs – Step 5

Straighten, Crop, Clean-up
Decrease Noise
Set a Black & White point
Balance your Tone
Sharpen Your Image

Sharpening your image

Making an HDR can bring out a lot of detail in an image, but that is “Tonal” detail. It doesn’t necessarily mean our image is Sharp. In fact the HDR process itself can soften an image. It may be from just the process, but we can also get softness from: the alignment of images, or the deghosting of images. We can even get some softness with any chromatic aberration fixes we do. And then there is the simple fact that straight out of the camera, raw images are not that sharp and require some post processing sharpening. I like to do it at the end of processing however instead of before I merge images. I also sharpen an image depending on the size of the image and how it will be used, Printed or web display as I talk about in this article devoted strictly to sharpening.

You can sharpen an image much ways. You can use sharpening tools in Lightroom, Or you can use some of the sharpening filters in Photoshop such as Un-sharp Mask or Smart Sharpening.

If you want to get a little more advanced, you can look into “HighPass” sharpening as discussed here.

And finally you may want to look at some of the sophisticated sharpening tools and plug-ins such as:

Nik Sharpener Pro 3.0
Topaz Labs Detail 2

Before Sharpening

After Sharpening

Which ever way you choose to do it a little sharpening goes a long way to take your HDR from Ehh to wow!

For more on sharpening read http://thehdrimage.com/sharpening-for-print-and-the-web-home-brews-and-nik-sharpener-pro-3-0/

And that concludes 5 Quick Ways to better HDRs. I hope they help you to refine your images and give them that little extra that gets you more and better comments on your work where ever you share it

Tagged sharpening | 4 Comments

5 Quick Steps to better HDRs – Step 4

By Peter | Published January 31, 2013

5 Quick Steps to Better HDRs – Step 4

Straighten, Crop, Clean-up
Decrease Noise
Set a Black & White point
Balance your Tone
Sharpen Your Image

Balance your Tone

Our HDR programs do a pretty good job in tone mapping our images and placing tone as we desire…or really as THEY desire. We can get a pretty good balance but quite honestly the program really doesn’t know everything that we want or it may not be able to accurately access the image for what tones should be where. We end up with images that look “dirty” with blackening or darker tones across something that is the same tone throughout.

We can make some adjustments but they act globally and may not get into the areas we want. To get all the tones in a certain area look correct. Sometimes the algorithm of HDR programs makes an assumption, that the top of your image is bright sky and the bottom of your image is a darker tone. So they apply things in a Gradient that is stronger at the top than at the bottom, which can work fine for say a sunset, but what if you have a tall building protruding into the sky, the top of that building is more likely to be darker than the bottom of it, especially as we up the grunge effects

Now with some programs such as Nik HDR Efex Pro 2, they allow for the use of “Control Points” (click for control point tut) Not only do they select a specific area but they also pick specific tone ranges to make adjustments to. (Very cool tech there)

But regardless of program we can also make these local adjustments in our finishing programs. In Lightroom we can use the Adjustment brush to smooth out tone. In Photoshop we can use the Dodge and Burn tools to make things Lighter (Dodging) or Darker (Burning).

Don’t be afraid to use the Dodge and Burn tools and it’s something that you should learn to use, they really come in handy. To get you started, select your Dodge or Burn Tool and then in the tool bar, set the opacity and fill to 10%. You then can choose what tone you want to either lighten or darken; Shadows, Mid-Tones or Highlights (You make a Shadow lighter by working on that, not brightening the highlights) Using just 10% allows you to work an area over gradually

Before

Dodged and Burned and selective adjustments

The image looks less dirty or black smuged

Next: Sharpen your image

Tagged Balance your tone | 1 Comment

5 Quick Steps to better HDRs – Step 3

By Peter | Published January 31, 2013

5 Quick Steps to Better HDRs – Step 3

Straighten, Crop, Clean-up
Decrease Noise
Set a Black & White point
Balance your Tone
Sharpen Your Image

Setting a Black and White Point

Here is something I found in an overwhelming number of images. In a quick look at about 50 images posted over half of them could have benefited from this simple adjustment; Setting a Black and White Point.

What does setting a Black and White point mean? Quite simply you are making an adjustment to an image and saying; this is Pure Black and this is Pure White. It will bring more clarity and detail to your image and eliminate that fog or haze you see in many images.

We get so tied up in making HDR, bringing out the detail with tone; making sure we can see detail no matter the tone. But the simple- fact is, in most images there are some areas that don’t have any detail, they are lost in the shadow, or lost in the highlight. I have even seen night scenes that have no set black point. Have you ever been out at night and not seen something black and hidden in the shadows? It’s just quite unnatural and leads to images that just don’t quite LOOK natural.

After all we are trying to capture the entire dynamic range of a scene, so why would you leave parts out?

Now of course there are some scenes and subjects that may not a true black or white point, so called High Key or Low Key images. Or, what you shot may only contain Mid-tones. But for the most part, if you are shooting an HDR, they have a pretty full range of tones. Like I said over 50% of the images I saw would benefit.

Setting a Black or White point (you don’t always need to set both) in Photoshop is quite easy. All you need is a curves or levels adjustment and you always want to have your “Info” tab open (window>info or F8 if it is not visible)

When you open Curves or Levels (or curves/levels adjustment layers) you will see 3 eye droppers on the side of the adjustment box, One is for Black Point, One for Gray Point and One for White point. We’ll ignore the gray point for now.

First take the Black Point sampler and go around your image while watching the RGB numbers in the Info box; you are looking for the lowest numbers in the image so check all the shadowed areas. Once you find a place with the lowest Numbers, click that area. That will set that point as R 0.G 0, B 0…Pure Black (some people use other points such as R5 G5 B5)

Next do the same for the White Point, sample around the brightest “White” areas of your image, clouds, white parts of building etc find the area that is closes to 255 and click and set that as your white point. There isn’t always a white point in an image; there more likely will be a black point.

One important thing to watch out for, Setting white levels and black levels can alter the White balance of an image, if your select a point that isn’t truly black or truly white, especially in a scene that is lit by incandescent lights or shot during the Golden hour. Sometimes we want to retain that color cast and there are times we tend to over-do white balance.

But if you do have a white balance problem in the image you did not correct earlier in the process (this is best corrected in the RAW state before combining exposures), this is where the GrayPoint sampler comes in. But you must make sure you sample a Neutral Gray area or you can make a real mess of things.

There are other ways to set Black and White points, such as draging end points in levels or curves and ways to do it in Lightroom too. So if you want to learn more a quick internet search will find you other lessons.

And that’s all there is to it

Before

After

No other post work was done to this image but setting Black and White Points.

Next: Balance your Tone

Tagged Setting Black Points and White Points | 3 Comments

5 Quick Steps to better HDRs – Step 2

By Peter | Published January 30, 2013

5 Quick Steps to Better HDRs – Step 2

Straighten, Crop, Clean-up
Decrease Noise
Set a Black & White point
Balance your Tone
Sharpen Your Image

Decrease Noise

As photographers we battle noise in our images on a regular basis. Whether that noise comes from under-exposure or from using a high ISO, we find noise in many of our images. HDR compounds that problem in a couple ways, one by multiplying the noise in each single image as it combines to one and also in the tone-mapping process. As we map tones to a different value we may bring up noise along with making something dark a lighter value.

We can try some of the simple tools in Lightroom to take down noise. They have gotten much better over the years and editions. But really I have found to tame noise as good as it can be but yet not loose a lot of detail and sharpness to our images it is best handled by using a dedicated Noise Reduction Program/Plug-in. Some of the best ones are

Nik Dfine 2.0
Topaz Labs Denoise 5
Neat Image

You will see noise mostly in areas of little texture such as skies or smooth water. What I like to do sometimes to keep detail in highly detailed areas, I will use a layer mask to just keep the noise reduction on the areas it is most visible and off of textured areas where noise is not readily seen

Before Noise Reduction

After Noise reduction

For further reading on Noise

http://thehdrimage.com/noise-and-noise-reduction-%e2%80%93-nik-dfine-2-0-neat-image-reviews/

http://thehdrimage.com/turn-down-that-noise-topaz-denoise-5/

Edit: Set a Black & White Point

Tagged HDR Noise reduction, Noise | 1 Comment

5 Quick Steps to better HDRs – Step 1

By Peter | Published January 29, 2013

Straighten, Crop, Clean-up
Decrease Noise
Set a Black & White point
Balance your Tone
Sharpen Your Image

Over the next few days I’ll be posting 5 quick steps you can take for better HDRs. These are all simple finishing techniques that can take an image from ehh…to wow.

I was inspired to write this after perusing the Google+ HDR Processing Community and seeing so many images that were almost there but missing these small yet magical elements. None of these posts are tell alls, but merely overviews, you can do more research either here at the site or by searching the internet if you want more specific information how to do a particular thing you saw in this lesson.

Straighten, Crop, Clean-up

The first thing you should do after taking your image out of your HDR Processing software is to do a little tidying up of the image. The HDR process can leave a little mess behind and you may have not been too tidy in your process taking the images so now is a good time to take care of those couple of things to give you a clean image to take further with a little post work.

Straighten your image.

We don’t always keep our cameras level when shooting (I’m terrible at this hand-held) so lines in our images may not be straight. The horizon line is the one most easily seen as being off so now is a great time to fix that.

There are many tools available in both Lightroom and Photoshop to accomplish this.

In Lightroom we can use the Crop tool in the develop module, just grab the corner and turn to align your horizon line with the grid, or you could use the Rotate control under Lens correction

In Photoshop, You can use the Measure Tool to draw a line on the line you want to straighten and then apply that with Edit> Image Rotation >Arbitrary Or in later versions of Photoshop you can use the Straighten Image tool in the settings bar the Crop Tool

Tilted Horizon

Straight Horizon

For a lesson about Perspective corrections see our sister site Here

Cropping

Creative cropping can add to our image, we can eliminate some distracting periphery in an image or even place subject better in our image (rule of thirds etc) with some creative cropping. We can even change orientation of the image or create other Aspect ratios, wide screen, square images etc.

Original

Cropped

Aspect Ratio Cropped

Clean-Up

And finally go around your image at 50-100% and look for all the little nasties in our image, especially things like Sensor spots that become much more visible both because we shoot at tight apertures (f/16, f/22) and because the HDR process may intensify them, also small objects that may have ghosted your image such as a bird flying through the scene.

In Lightroom, use the Spot Removal tool. In Photoshop you can use a myriad of tools such as the Healing tool, the Patch Tool and the Clone Stamp Tool

Original

Cleaned image

With all of this house cleaning done you are ready to move on to the next steps for a better HDR Image.

Next: Decrease Noise

Tagged Clean-up Images, Crop, Straighten | 4 Comments

Gray Skies forever? Photomatix Pro

By Peter | Published December 15, 2012

I’ll start this rant off with my usual disclaimer: Artistic Intent, I don’t care what you do to your image provided it was Artistic Intent. Backwards, inside out and purple…fine if that’s was your intent. It’s when you did it because you didn’t know any better, that’s when I have a problem and I’m here to help.

My two biggest pet peeves in HDR images are; Halos and Gray Clouds that should be white. The funny thing is, most likely the same thing is responsible for both.

It’s a very simple fix but one that a lot of people don’t seem to either know about or even want to fix. But it certainly drives me nuts. Now I am not talking about gray storm clouds and having them mean and menacing-looking, as is possible in HDR images. I’m talking about beautiful white puffy clouds on a fair weather day being turned gray by over-processing the image. You may, as this image shows, also have some graying to the blue sky and some black halos around the clouds- all of them undesireable

It seems to be more pronounced in Photomatix possibly than other programs but certainly possible in all and it has a simple cause and a simple fix.

The reason the clouds look gray is that the image’s tonal range has been completely compressed to that of a mid-tone. When you make white a midtone…it turns to gray. Simple as that.

Gray Cloud Settings

To fix it, is just as simple, Turn down your strength, use a more natural Lighting setting. That’s all you have to do. You can up your detail or saturation or whatever you want to do, but use these control judiciously. Oh and I bet your Halos take a vacation too.

White Cloud settings

Hope that helps,

Tagged Gray Clouds, Why are my clouds gray in my HDR? | 1 Comment

Measuring & Exposing for Dynamic Range

By Peter | Published December 12, 2012

Reader, friend and fellow photographer Todd B asked me to go into more detail on how I measure the dynamic range of a scene and then decide how I will shoot the exposures for that scene.

What I do is quite simple. I set my camera to Aperture Priority mode and the aperture and ISO I will be shooting with. I then set my metering mode to spot. I use aperture priority for this instead of Manual because I am just looking for numbers (shutter speeds) right now. I may, and probably will, end up shooting in a different mode, most likely manual.

I then seek out the brightest and darkest areas of my scene. If the sun is in the shot, don’t measure it for many reasons. First off it’s not good for your eyes or your camera and secondly because of its brightness you will end up with exposures that in reality have very little use. If the sun is just at the horizon line you may be OK, but anything above that you are asking for trouble. But in most circumstances if the sun is in my image I will meter slightly to the side or above it.

Also make note of one phenomenon, just as the sun hit the horizon it is not always the brightest region of the image and the clear sky above or a reflection off a cloud may actually register higher

So setting my spot meter on the brightest area I will take note of the shutter speed at that point, I then search my field for the darkest area of the scene and take note of that shutter speed. Now the only thing I need to do is connect those two with a number of exposures

So we know that using our camera’s reflective meters (or even a handheld reflective meter) that meter is going to meter for a midtone and that’s OK because we really don’t want that brightest or darkest area to be anything but a midtone at the most. There is no point in taking a highlight and making it a shadow nor a shadow and making it a highlight.

Shooting exposure beyond those two measured midtones will lead us to shooting way too many exposures which lead to problems with alignment and processing speed later. Also, shooting exposures beyond what we measured leads to problem with noise in shadows and loss of detail in highlights (Bloom)

Deciding on Exposures

The first thing I will think about in my head is, how many stop range is the dynamic range of this scene. Luckily since we are using shutter speed it’s easy to think in your mind how many stops. A doubling or Halving of Shutter speed is one stop. 1/100 to 1/200 = one stop.

If I have less than 4 stops, I probably won’t shoot an HDR at all. There really is no point; our cameras are able to cover that dynamic Range.

If I measure at or around 4 stops I’m probably just going to use AEB (Automatic Exposure Bracketing) with a shutter speed in the middle of the two ends as my starting point and just do 3 exposures +-2EV(stops). This is really sufficient for 1/.2 of the scenarios we come across outdoors.

If it is beyond that I will shoot 1 step exposures going from one end to the other, no matter what that number of exposures is. And I don’t sit there and calculate it out. I start with my camera set at one end of the range and then just turn my shutter exposure dial 3 click for every stop (my camera is set for 1/3 stop intervals) Until I see my final exposure is at the other end.

Some of the newest camera on the scene now allow for 7 or 9 exposures AEB, if you’re lucky enough to have one you can set yours up instead of the method I use. This also helps eliminate and camera shake even on a tripod as moving a dial can cause.

After I shoot my first series, I will go through and check my histograms and make sure I have pretty much pegged each end. If I see one or either end not quite to the end I may add an exposure or two

The only thing left to do if you are shooting close to sunrise or sunset is to keep an eye on the starting point of your exposures as the light changes every 10 minutes or so. This is when I have my handheld exposure meter handy so I don’t need to take the camera off the tripod to get a reading.

Then after the sun sets, you should measure the entire range again as it will change quite dramatically shooting into the Blue Hour as the Dynamic Range lowers considerable although the first 10-15 minutes of Blue Hour the DR of the sky is still quote high.

And that’s all I do

Also posted in HDR Lesson | Tagged Dynamic Range, Exposures, Measuring Dynamic Range, Metering, Number of HDR Exposures | 4 Comments

HDR isn’t always Necessary OR Better

By Peter | Published September 27, 2012

I’ve said this before when we talk about measuring the dynamic range of our scene. ‘If you don’t need HDR don’t use it”

It can be simply just an waste of time and Hard Drive storage space or it may even be detrimental to your final image.

Sometimes we just need to be reminded of this

Last weekend down at the Harbor I was shooting some buildings, mid-day, bright sunny mostly cloudless day. Measuring the dynamic range it really wasn’t beyond -2, + 2 of the meter. But for a couple of the buildings I shot an HDR 3 exposure +2, 0, -2 series just to see if something interesting may come of it. Well it didn’t

Here is one building in particular. One image is the HDR, one is just the 0 exposure.

There really isn’t anything I like better about the HDR image. It’s flat, the highlights have become grayed because the tone-mapping compression tried to make everything a mid-tone. There is WAY more noise in the HDR, sensor spots are much more visible in the HDR. I don’t feel the image is as sharp as the single image either.

Now some may say, “Yes but look at the shade side of the building ,it has more detail”. Well, It has lighter detail, I wouldn’t say more detail. In fact that side of the building looks more realistic in the single shot in it’s tonal rendition than the HDR does.

Remember we use HDR to bring back detail lost in shadows or highlights, not necessarily just to brighten/darken an area of the image. We still want a full range of tones, just with detail in almost all tones (there really shouldn’t be any or much detail in zone 1 or 10)

Now if you wanted to use HDR just to bring out more detail with Micro Contrast. I still think you would be better off tone-mapping a single image using the Single Image Processing in Photomatix Pro or Nik HDR Efex Pro 2. Or software like Topaz Labs Adjust 5 than doing a multiple exposure HDR. I don’t see the benefit.

But of course that is your artistic decision

Also posted in HDR Editorial | Tagged HDR or Not, When to use HDR | 2 Comments

You Say Halo, I say Goodbye – PhotoMatix Pro 4.2

By Peter | Published August 21, 2012

OK, so I’m on a Beatle Kick today

So you love that Grunge look to your HDRs but then you post them to Flickr, 500px or your favorite Photography forum and get all kinds of He** for Halos around trees, buildings and other areas of high contrast. So what’s an HDRer to do?

Well take a hold of one of the controls in Photomatix Pro and use the He** out of it. The Smooth Highlights control.

What the Smooth Highlights control does is just as the name suggests, It smooths the area between a Highlight and a shadow or midtone so that it is a smooth gradation in tone and not an abrupt one that causes halos

We can see the results here using the normal Grunge Preset in Photomatix Pro 4.2

If we take the control up to 100 we see that it pretty much eliminates a good portion of the halos between the sky and the palm trees

Now we can also take the grunge look one step further with a Grunge preset that I did and have included HERE for download. That brings back in a little bit of shadow to the image still keeping that Graphic CGI look but bringing back in just a little tone

Any other haloing can be taken care of using the burn tool in Photoshop or an Adjustment brush in Lightroom. In Photoshop, set the Burn tool to Highlights and 10% and just some light strokes around some of the edges should do it, In Lightroom you can take the adjustment brush and up the exposure -10 – 20 and brush over the areas to even them out.