My Dad recently turned me on to a website that gives a pretty good tutorial on how to enhance photo’s using HDR processing. HDR or High Dynamic Range when done properly can take a ho-hum image and really make it pop. To get super geeky about it, it uses your camera’s Auto Exposure Bracketing function to take 3 separate photo’s with one press of the take button. It takes a photo at one setting lower, one setting higher, and at the setting you have selected. You can then use software to combine all three images together so that the highs come out and lows come out equally. I was intrigued by the whole process and thought I’d have a go at it.
There is a really good look out at my work where you can really get a good view of the sunset every day. So I took my new rig with me to work tonight and at 5:17PM, captured the sunset with my Auto Exposure Bracketing function enabled. Sure enough, it took 3 photo’s. When I got home tonight, I loaded them all up into Photomatix and followed the tutorial step by step. Here are my results…
Original photo’s:
shot 1
shot 2
shot 3
As you can see, there’s hardly any difference between the three shots. The example used on the website I was following along with had pretty steep differences in his three shots he was using, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect or if I had done something wrong? Regardless, I threw them all into the software and let the processing magic happen. After the merger of the three shots, I then imported it into Photoshop and did some noise reduction and tinkered with the opacity and layers a bit to get my final result which is below…
Final Result...
It looks like it pops more but I think the dark levels are just more extreme. I dunno, the example he uses is more of a city scape with a lot of lights and people in it. My shot has no people and no lights but I do think it looks better. So I’m not really sure this worked or not? I will be venturing out this weekend to do some more test photo’s in different lighting scenarios so we’ll see…
Here is an hdr I did on Saturday of the sunset from Castle Rock.
http://www.adamcartwright.com/Photostream/Landscapes/Colorado-Sunsets/15635099_Ye9A3#1171486860_PmTN6-A-LB
Keep it up, hdr is fun.
Wow, that’s nice! I had a bit of trouble using the masking function in PS. I don’t think I had something set correctly. I’m going to try a bunch of other shots this weekend to see if I can make it a little bit better…Thanks for showing me your work though!
Hey Scott,
My fiance has also experimented a bit with HDR and has some good results. See her website below. It seems to be a struggle at times controlling the exposure of the (3) pics, but nothing Photoshop can’t edit after the fact.
http://www.fusionlightandesign.com/hdr/high-dynamic-range/
P.S. I’m Tim Stoecklein’s younger brother and live in Denver. Hope to see you out this spring!
Jeff, thanks for the link! I’m hoping some more fiddling with my camera settings will result in some better shots. I’m gonna head out later in the week to give this another go since it looks like the weather will be better. Speaking of which, Spring is almost here so hope to see you out there as well!