Sorry I have been away so long, sometimes life just gets in the way.

back to business.

So I was reading an article recently on HDR and it said you shouldn’t shoot moving objects for HDR especially like birds and animals. Which in principle I agree with and have even said so in my tutorials. But then I thought to myself, wait a minute, I just did just that. I shot birds in flight in an HDR.

So really while I wouldn’t want my whole scene to be moving object it really is quite possible IF you know how AND you have the great Photomatix Pro4.0

Here’s how.

As you can see from my three images shot  at 0, -2 and +2 EV, The birds have moved quite a distance from image 1 to image 3

So let’s fix that so we only have one set of clear, clean and sharp birds

Open your multiple exposures in Photomatix, In the first screen, as you usally come to, check the box for “Reduce Ghosting Artifacts”  and ” Semi-Manual Deghosting” Set the rest of the options as you normally would.

Next up, This window will pop up and in it you can use your mouse and the target to select the area you want to de-ghost (click on images to enlarge for a better view of these screen shots)

Now, depending on the objects, you may be able to select the entire group as I did in this case, or you may have to go in and select each object individually for the best results. After you trace around your object, right click that area and say “Mark Selection as Ghosted Area”

You can then click on “Preview Deghosting” and see if you have what you want, If not you can return to the selection process and reselect new areas or redo the areas you selected.  

Once you make the selection, if you right click the selection again on previewing, you have the option of choosing different ones of your exposures to use as the non-ghosted area. In this case I choose the +2EV Image as the one I wanted for the Pelicans

Once you have what you want, click OK and go on to Tone Map your image as you usually would.

And there you have it, an HDR with objects in motion…Done