Category Archives: Uncategorized

B+HDR+W

Dec
13
2012
by Peter | Comments Off

The Black & White HDR

 

Thanks to Black & White artist and authority Cort Anderson for the inspiration for this article

Most times when people think about HDR they do not think about B & W images. A Google search for HDR Images did not turn up a single B & W image in 10 pages of image results.

Now I guess that is understandable because people do like the color pop that HDR can provide and it has become a staple of “That HDR Look”. But HDRs can make an outstanding Black & White image. Of the 1,000 HDR images in my portfolio 1/3 of them are a B & W conversion.

Continue reading »

Follow up to the Nik HDR Efex Pro 2 Review

Jul
13
2012
by Peter | 3 Comments

Over on Facebook someone asked to show the differences between Nik HDR Efex Pro and the New Nik HDR Efex Pro 2 in a side by side comparison image.

Which is a reasonable request but there are some problems with this if you don’t look at it with a few things in mind. HEP2 not only has a new HDR Algorithm, it also has some big changes in controls. So how do you separate out what is due to the algorithm and what is because of the controls? Then on top of that even if the controls were exactly the same the images would not look similar because the beginning default image is of a lighter luminance value with the new algorithm than the old Continue reading »

Shoot Mid-Day, Yes, Yes you can!

Jul
02
2012
by Peter | 7 Comments

Shoot Mid-day, Yes, Yes you can!

Anyone that’s been into photography knows, one of the most taught rules is “Never shoot in the middle of the day”. Even Scott Kelby during a The Grid broadcast a couple months ago during the “Live Critique” show that got a lot of buzz said so. To Paraphrase him. ” If you are a landscape shooter, there are two times a day to shoot. Other than that forget it”. And to directly quote him, talking about shooting during Golden Hours. ” That is the absolute most basic thing” ,  And,  “If you don’t do that, you can throw it in the trash”
Rutt rowww…Mr. Kelby, Did you just tell me I can’t do something? Not a good thing to do to this dawg.
But of course he is right and it also extends to portrait/wedding photographers and others. He’s right…well maybe he was right.
So why do we not shoot during the Mid-day? Well, the light is harsh, shadows are in the wrong place, colors are bad and I’m sure we could state a few more things and I guess we would be right.
But I’m going to say. We’re not.
Case in point. Saturday I took a drive down PCH ( Pacific Coast Highway) on a simply beautiful day. I pulled off in Cardiff by the Sea in one of the few remaining parking spaces that was left because it was such a beautiful summer day. It was about 1:30PM, certainly not a time of day we would shoot.
I got out, grabbed my camera and headed to the water. It was spectacular, the sky was a beautiful deep blue with white puffy clouds, the water a beautiful seafoam green. The sand a warm golden tone and the kelp washed ashore a sparkling emerald green. Wow how wonderful.
Snap went the shutter.
And I got this:
OK Mr. Kelby you’re right. I can’t shoot Mid-Day. The light is harsh, the color is bad, it’s all washed out. The dynamic range is multiplied by the specular highlights off water which can drive meters batty. It’s just an ugly day with bad light…Hey wait a minute! I’m standing here looking at it…
Umm…no it’s NOT. It’s FRIGGEN beautiful out!
So is the light really bad? Or, can our camera, as we knew them, just not capture it?

A flawed system

No matter what we may think, now or years ago. Digital or Film. Small formats or big honking 8 x 10 Large format. Cameras are a flawed system. They just are. They don’t see as well as our eyes and when you really consider that our “Human” camera is a system of both Lens (our eyes) and our mind that make up that system. They don’t even come close.
In fact our mind plays a huge role in how we see. Without our mind’s interaction, everything we see would be upside down and backwards. Our mind corrects for our eyes, the lens. We even use composition to do what our mind does naturally.
As a photographer, what can make us great or better than another photographer is knowing these flaws and how best to correct or compensate for them. It is, in some ways, what made Ansel Adam’s so great. Besides a great eye for light, composition and quite frankly shooting places that not many people could see without his photographs at the time. Mr. Adams knew and understood the flaws of his camera and film. It was the basis for his Zone System. It what made him know to expose a certain way, then process another and develop this way. To get the most out of a system he knew very well and knew if he didn’t do this he could not recreate in art what his eyes saw.
Getting back to my day at the beach
What my eyes actually saw was this:
 
Brought to you courtesy of…yes…HDR. High Dynamic Range Imagery.
So the “Rule” of photography of not shooting mid-day is not one brought about by our subject and “Bad Light” but it really was brought about by a flawed system that just wasn’t capable of capturing the light that was there. And while our lenses do a pretty good job of replicating our eyes, the sensor somewhat less as far as dynamic range goes. But the part that really is missing is that our camera is incapable of the manipulation our mind adds to this of putting together the range of luminance and color and in some ways boosting the midtones into the scene at an acceptable and pleasing level (The “Two Looks” theory).
Now don’t get me wrong, The Golden Hours are still an amazing time to shoot, as can be the Blue Hours (You forgot them Mr. Kelby) And I am not saying that HDR can make up for truly bad lighting situations. I still maintain it must be great light. In fact I will say that part of the day usually is not the best time to shoot. The 2 or 3 hour period leading up to the Golden hour when the haze and pollution in the sky increases. The angle of the sun is just in a bad sometimes in those hours. What I AM saying is. Look, Look around, does it look nice to your eyes? Then we should be able to capture that and HDR may allow us to do that or at least do that more often.
The truth is there are times that it is just is better to shoot mid-day.

What to shoot Mid-Day

A few  examples of things that may be better shot Mid-day: Well we have the beach scenes that we already talked about. Think about the above scenes with a colorful umbrella in the image or children’s sand pails at the waters edge. Just be careful of specular highlights on the water. Take them into consideration when metering the scene. Remember what a specular highlight is; it is a reflection and in this case it is a refection of the sun which can be many times brighter than our ambient EV15 light of a typical sunny day.
Shooting in Canyon Areas or close to a mountain range. When you are close to a mountain range that the sun sets or rises over. You really can’t wait for the Golden Hour. In fact the sun may set behind them a good two hours before civil sunset.
Shooting in Slot Canyons can be even worse. There may only be a short window of time that a great shot is possible in slot canyons and the dynamic range can really be high from the interiors to the sky. Waiting till too late in the day can really yield some really poor results as was shown in this article I wrote last year.
Wildflowers: This is one that really needs consideration. One of the reasons we sometimes can’t shoot wildflowers  during Golden hours is that a lot of flowers have not yet opened or start to close during that period. (Some flowers also close when it is windy and winds can increase towards sunset) And there are times shooting huge fields of wildflowers just looks great in the middle of a beautiful blue sky day.
But shooting wildflowers in the middle of the day do pose a couple problems. Ome that isn’t instantly recognizable if we do our usual HDR routine of measuring the Dynamic Range or brightness of the scene. At first with measuring the scene it may appear that it isn’t even that high of dynamic range. But our meters do get fooled with this and it’s one time we may be better off taking a shot and looking at our RGB histogram. One color channel usually blows out.

Red Channel Blowout and Flower movement are a problem in this image

Most often, especially with, red, orange, Yellow flowers, it is the red channel. So shooting HDR helps with keeping this channel under control and giving us a much sharper image than a standard one because just like when we blow out all channels (white) it causes a great loss in detail.

But there is something that does get in our way of shooting flower fields with HDR. Movement. Even with a subtle breeze wildflowers move, sometimes they simply vibrate but that causes more loss of detail and sharpness. It makes it difficult enough with a single image because we have to keep the Shutter speed up to stop the motion. I often end up shooting at a higher ISO because even though there may be bright sun, using f/16 for my aperture yields a 1/100 shutter speed and I need much more.
Now, consider that,  plus  now you want to do multiple exposures? I think not. So this is an instance where I will recommend a single exposure but then using some of the tools we have with HDR and doing a Single Image, Tone Mapped.

Single Image Tone Mapped Shot 12:24PM

No it is not a true HDR but what we are instead doing is something I alluded to earlier. How the mind puts together an image sometimes more so than the eye and we can simulate this by using tone-mapping to bring down the highlights till they fit and don’t blow out and then boosting the mid-range that our eye/brain combo gets so right but our cameras, as we knew them, get so wrong.

So get out there and experiment, try, look around. How do the conditions appear to your eye? If it looks nice, maybe it is nice. Maybe we just didn’t have the tools we needed before. But with HDR we do. I’m not sure that people yet understand the power that HDR enables us. Once we understand that as well as we did the limitations of our system, we may be quite limitless.
And images like this are possible. Okay Mr. Kelby, anything else you would like to tell me I can’t do?

Shot 3:55PM

Hope that helps,
PT
PS For you portrait shooters, did you know it’s possible to shoot mid-day too? Not HDR but there are ways that you too can overcome the limitations of our flawed system have. Ask me.

Alignment – When it all goes wrong

Feb
21
2012
by Peter | Comments Off

Alignment

Something I have brought up in the past about over-shooting a scene –  taking too many exposures –  popped up last week in one of my images. I was shooting the ocean sunset and shot 6 exposures using AEB + EC (Auto Exposure Bracketing – Exposure Compensation) It’s a quick way to get 6 (usually 5 because one can be a duplicate) exposures of a scene without having to do much figuring.
When I got home I threw the 6 images into Photomatix Pro 4.1 and selected my usual alignment “Match Features”. I use this because often I have some complex objects in the foreground and I need them aligned as perfectly as possible.
I merged the image and what I got was this “widescreen” image. and you can see a misaligned  handrail on the right side.
?
What? I didn’t shoot widescreen! Going back and looking at the images I could see what the problem was as we can see here looking at the six exposures

The first two exposures are so under-exposed they have very little detail left in them for the software to find edges to align. (You can also have this probelm on an too over-exposed image that is totally blown out)
So the simple answer could have been to just eliminate those two exposures from the merge, they may not have had enough information – as is the case when people over-shoot a scene- to even be worthwhile putting in the mix.
So I did that and still using “Match Features” for the alignment mode, Photomatix perfectly aligned the image and did not crop off any part of the image
OK, great. But the truth is, the image did not have the color range I wanted especially in the dusk sky. So I went back and merged all 6 images again, this time choosing “Match Horizontal and Vertical shifts”. Because there was, even in the lowest two exposures a clear line for the horizon, this would be a good choice.
 
Using this method, I got a perfect alignment AND the full range of color and luminosity (and DR) that I wanted for the image.
Just another example that shows us that using the same setting all the time, even if we really like that setting, isn’t always the right choice. And that experimentation may be the best thing to do to achieve your final goal.
One final thing to note was that the image WITHOUT the two darkest exposures was actually darker than the one with all 6 images. (Both used the same tone mapping) this is because the software needed to bring some information down into the shadow area and it brought some of the midtones with it.
Hope that helps
PT

My Second Book is NOW Available!

Nov
30
2010
by Peter | Comments Off

My second Book,” How to Take Great Photos”  is now available on Rockable Press

 It’s  about how anyone can take better photos with just some simple knowledge of what professionals do to take their images from Snapshots to Photographs.

Sorry no HDR in this book, but that’s why we have this website!

It’s available as an Ebook because we don’t need no stinkin paper

Click here to visit Rockable Press.

Do I really need HDR?

Oct
26
2010
by Peter | 1 Comment

Do I really need HDR?

Great question. I always tell people, if you don’t need HDR don’t use it. If you can capture an image correctly without it, do so. But that is the same advice I would give for any photographic tool or accessory. If you don’t need a polarizing filter? take it off, No need for fill flash? don’t use it. Don’t need Photoshop? Print your image SOOC. HDR is just another tool.

There are many ways to do without HDR. The time of day you shoot, and more importantly, your angle to the sun can take away any need to shoot with HDR. When the sun is setting turn your back to the sunset and shoot that way. In a lot of cases not only are you able to capture the dynamic range of a scene, you actually will be capturing something 10 times better than the sunset.

But what about the times when, with conventional photography, you wouldn’t even have attempted the shot because you knew, as good as it looks to your eyes, you are never going to be able to capture that as you saw it on camera. I think this is the perfect time to pull out the best tool for the job and get that image that previously was impossible. In some case that may just be a Graduated Neutral Density Filter. I use them all the time and I do like them and for when I am shooting the ocean they are perfect because of the straight line at the horizon.

But what happens when you have irregular shapes to deal with? A mountain range or, in the case to follow, architectural arches leading to a bright scene. A graduated neutral density filter is useless.

So lets examine this photo made using a 5 Exposure 1 – 1.5 Stop HDR ( Tone mapping: Strength 70, Saturation 70, High Smoothing ,-1.20 Gamma in Photomatix)

This image really portrays the scene as I saw it; Great clouds and blue skies, shadows & light coming through the arches. The back of the arches in the shade but still clearly visible to my eyes as is the tree on the right.

Now suppose we didn’t use HDR, what would the image look like? This is one of the exposure from the 5 I took that gets the most right.

It’s really not too bad, but the problems areas are: the tree to the right is definitely lost to the shadows and the biggest problem is those beautiful blue skies and puffy white clouds have lost all their detail.

So, we could using digital darkroom techniques try to bring some of that back

This was using a heavy dose of Shadows & Highlights in Photoshop

Well, this helped, it did bring back the tree into the image and got a little more detail back into the sky, but it couldn’t do much because there are parts of the clouds that were just completely blown out so there is no detail to recover. The other real problem is that it applied this adjustment globally to the whole image, so some areas that should have stayed in the shadows are now brought up into the mid-tones, making for a “flat” image. Yes we could have tried using a Layer Mask, but that can be a lot of work and time.

In this example I used some  Faux HDR “Lucis Effect”  to bring back some detail which it is quite good at but again,we still are not near where the HDR image is in overall balance and again it acted too globally.

Now what if we started with an image that got the clouds and skies right, could we have adjusted that?

 

This attempt really gave the worst results because you can see, the parts where there still was some detail are now full with ugly noise and again there are some areas that were just totally lost in the shadows wth no information to retrieve.

Now, maybe if I really worked long and hard in the digital darkroom I could have achieved better results  on a standard photograph. Lots of layer masks and adjustments, dodging, burning, sharpening, noise reduction. But do I really want to waste that much time in my studio working? Or…would I rather be out shooting, taking the less than a minute to shoot 5 frames and come back and process the image in a few minutes and have the best results. The answer is clear what I would choose.

Hope that helps!

PT

HDRsoft Introduces Photomatix Pro 4.0

Oct
04
2010
by Peter | Comments Off

HDRsoft Updated their popular HDR software Photomatix Pro to version 4.0 on September 28th.

I haven’t had time yet to play with it and compare to previous versions but a quick glance shows to be what appears to be a better preview window along with some preset thumbnails, which I’m just not crazy about presets. And what is supposed to be better noise reduction in the image combining screen. I’ve got to give it a full run through and see all the goodies.

Of course they made some changes to the screens so now that made my HDR tutorial a little dated so I will have to update the tutorial a bit. But let me give it a workout first.

To update or to download Photomatix Pro Version 4.0 go to HDRsoft

Hello world! Welcome to the HDR Image

Sep
03
2010
by Peter | Comments Off

Hi everyone! Welcome to The HDR Image. High Dynamic Range as it should be.

Here I will show examples of my work in HDRI ( High Dynamic Range Imagery), show you some How To’s and talk about all things HDR. I hope you enjoy this and maybe learn a few things and most of all have fun with a new and exciting tool to add to your photography.

One note, If you came here to look for or discuss the science of this all you probably came to the wrong place. I’m not a scientist, nor a mathematician. I’m a photographer. Could I understand and follow a conversation about the it? Sure, but I don’t want to. It bores me to tears as it does many photographers that are more artist than technicians.

So even though there is a lot of technology to this, I’m not going into all the numbers and have people turn off and click off. It will be in the most simplest terms I know how to present and how most of my student like to learn.

If you are interested in the tech, I would point you to  Cambridge  in Colour Really a great read

Peter