In this episode I'll show you how to create
an HDR image Adorama TV presents exploring photography
with Mark Wallace where you learn innovative techniques
on shooting a wide range of photography here's your host
hi everybody welcome to another episode of exploring photography right here on
Adorama TV well I'm here in Quito Ecuador on a very busy and somewhat noisy
street
in front of the Basilica of the National Vow
and this is why most amazing Basilicas in all South America
and I wanted to get a great picture of the Interior now I tried to shoot that with
just my camera and a single
frame camera on a tripod well the problem is there's so much going on that
the dynamic range my camera just wasn't large enough
to fit in all the highlights and shadows and the darks so that meant this the
perfect candidate
to shoot in HDR image HDR means
a high dynamic range you take a multiple shots
a underexposed properly exposed overexposed images
and you put that all together in post-production to get everything
in one shot now out of respect for the worshipers inside the Basilica it's
still an active church
we decided not to film inside the church itself
but i wanna show you how I created this HDR image in post-production so here's
how that worked
let's dive right into Lightroom five and I'll show you how I created my
high-dynamic range HDR image now to create an HDR image you need at least
3 photos one that is exposed correctly
and underexposed and overexposed image you can even do more than that you could
do five images two that are underexposed
by different amounts two that are overexposed by different amounts and one that is exposed
correctly but you need at least three
and I think that works well for most photos, if we look at this
image right here. I'm actually gonna go back to the first image
this is the image that my camera thinks is exposed correctly and
we know that if we look over here at the xf data says exposure bia
0 EV and in other words i didn't use any exposure compensation I just shot using what the
camera
used through the lens metering to say it was a correct exposure
we have some issues though we can see way up here in the top at the Basilica
there is too much light streaming through here so we're losing a lot of
the detail
you can see it's overexposed in this area and then at the bottom down here
underneath these pews and the columns were just not seeing a lotta detail
so than HDR image what you'll do is in addition to your normal
photo that you take you can either use exposure compensation or bracketing
in your camera and you need to take one that is
underexposed an image that underexposed and image that overexposed by equal
amounts
so I chose two stops you can see here in exposure bias:
I under exposed by exactly two stops using exposure compensation
but look what I get when I do that up here
I'm now seeing the details that were missing in the other photo
of the light streaming through creating these patterns of color
on the top at the Basilica you can see now I can see my stained glass windows
those aren't blown out
and then on my overexposed image this is overexposed by
two stops you can now see that we're starting to see details
in our pews in our columns and when we combine all those things
we should get a shot that looks like this this is one that I created
earlier we see all the details up here as well
as all the details in the pews and on the columns
so that's what an HDR image is now there's a lot of ways to create an HDR
image
in Lightroom. Most people will use
Photoshop export to Photoshop I'm using some software that makes it
easier I like to do things in the easiest way possible
and so let me show you this I am using
from HDRsoft theres a plugin called Photomatix is also a stand-alone piece
of software
and it is terrific because it really takes the complicated
maneuvers of tone mapping all the stuff that you normally do
and really makes it a simple interface now this is a stand-alone
application it looks like this it doesn't look like much right now but
we'll see how it
actually works with Lightroom but before we do that
let's check out this contest from Adorama
So we're gonna use that and it really helps out so what I'll do is
I will select all 3 of my images, correct underexposed and
overexposed I will right click and then
I'm going to export this and
I'm going to export that too Photomatix Pro
and when I do that I get this little dialogue box it's
gonna pop up here it's gonna give me some options now the first thing that's very
important to understand is your images have to line up so you need to shoot
your HDR images on a tripod you can try this handheld
but if you're not really really steady and if you have a really slow shutter
speeds like I did on this I had some that were
six seconds and twenty seconds something like that it's just not going to work
so make sure you shoot on a tripod unless you just can't
so this will help to align things aren't exactly lined up if there's maybe some
camera shake
also we have some options to remove ghosts options there
what that means is perhaps you're shooting outside you have a tree that
being blown by the wind
well it's gonna look different in one image than the other and so you can
choose which image you want to use that still parts you don't have the sort
of ghosted areas
we don't have that problem in this but and this is something that you would
always leave checked also reducing noise
really helps out in the underexposed images so have in those dark areas if they
get a bit noisy
Photomatix actually take that noise out which is really really helpful
now also make sure I click reduce chromatic aberrations
just helps with some of the weird fringes you get around different
objects and then I'm automatically gonna re import this into Lightroom
later we're gonna do some sharpening in Photoshop so were not gonna be done
end of this and I want to use my file name all my combined file names
and this is going to come in as a 16-bit tif image
so we'll do that you can also do I was doing
the final in the first photo that will help it be easy
okay so now I'm gonna click export and Lightroom now is going to kick in
and is actually exporting these you can see this status
this will take a little while depending on how large your images are
now another important thing while this is going that I have to make sure you
understand
you need shoot in raw mode on your camera
you can do this using Jpeg images but raw is going to be so much more
data to work with alright so now these images are going to be merged
and what we have to do is we have to do something called tone mapping were we
tell our software where we want to black point to be the white point to be how
saturated we want things to be
how big the effect is that we're using and so that's that we're gonna do next
right now Photomatix is asking me
to help it with the ghost so if we had some
things here maybe these flags shaking some trees we can go in here
in here and de ghost that
telling it where exactly the problems are we don't have any problems in this
so I'm just going to say
okay now the HDR is being merged
and we have to manipulate this to look according to the way we
want this to be interpreted so we have all kinds of artistic license here
now I'm gonna show you one of the things that just drives me nuts
with HDR photos and that's when people
actually overdo it looks something like this: I find these pictures
absolutely disgusting and because it just looks
horrible to me and so it's just oversaturated there's just too much
stuff here
and so a lot of early HDR images in fact a lot
images out there right now have this sort of quality to them and I just think it's
disgusting
and my apologies to you if you love this kinda stuff but I like it to make my
images look
like real photos photo realistic in Photomatix there are some presets and
so you can go through these presets and get a good starting point to figure out
exactly
where you want to go from and so I'm gonna choose here this balanced
actually is this photographic, this little bit too much
you can go through here there's just a bunch of different things you can play
with these
at your leisure heres one that creative and what its doing is it's sort of like a
preset in Lightroom
so will back up here and this one here is called natural
this ones balance default I think we'll start with default
that looks pretty good to start with now the next thing we need to do is go in
here and
figure out exactly what we need to do on the left side here there's different
sliders that you can play with
what I wanna do first is map the White Point
the Black Point and gamma. So the White Point if I slide this all the way to the
left
it's saying where white begins and ends if I slide it to the left
were not gonna get a lot of highlights if I slide it to the right
all the way we're gonna get a lot of these highlights so I don't want to be
so much I'm just gonna adjust this so I get details up in the sky here
and what I'll do here is all scale this up to 100 percent so we can you see that
so I want details up here in the sky without getting things overblown so I'll play
with that just a bit
so were getting some details there the other thing I wanna do is adjust the strength
and that adjusts the overall mix between the three images so I'm gonna bring that up
so it's around ninety and I'm just playing with values until I get this to
look
the way I want it to look here in the middle and the other thing we can play
with here is our Black Point
and that same wind is black start and end if I go to the right
we've got a lot of black if i pull that back to the left a little bit not so much
so it to be contrasty but I don't wanna lose detail
in my dark area so I'm gonna go to about
an about right here and again this is a lot of
adjusting to taste the other thing that we can do here is change our
gamma. Gamma is the difference between the darkest and the brightest
think of it sort of like contrast so if I slide it to the right here
for less contrasty the slide it to the left
little bit more contrasty so I'm gonna to find a balance there
and this looks pretty good to me, the other thing we can do is adjust the color
temperature
were gonna warm this up a little bit just to make it look a little bit more
like it has a lot of natural light which it did
so I will do that, then there are a lot of other things we can do here detail
contrast to sort of show
our high detail so I'm gonna increase that just a little bit
now we also have these lighting adjustments and the
Photomatix allows you to slide this to the right for
more or less adjustments or we can click this lighting effects mode
and I'm just gonna choose some these presets here
that we took from over here and so once we've done that now we have a little bit
too much going on here
so I'll adjust my gamma to bring that difference down just a little bit
I'll play with my white point you can see that we can play with this quite a bit
until we get something
that looks good exactly the way you want it to be and that's the joy of this is you
get to choose
exactly how you want your image to look so I'll get it to be something about right
here I'm gonna adjust just my gamma just a little bit more It was just a little bit to contrasty
I like that so once I'm done manipulating this and normally I would maybe spend
a little bit more time on this but gotta keep going here
I'm going to click Save in re import what that will do
its gonna save this as an an tif image really high resolution tif image
and it will import it right back into Lightroom and so we zip over to
Lightroom
and here we go its gonna pop back in here to Lightroom
and I'm working in a
collection here's so its not gonna show up my collection
so I'm gonna do is I'm gonna right click and I'm gonna go to my folder in the library
so we can actually see what we just did
and here is the image that we just created okay
I like that looks pretty good but one other things are really want for this to
have is really
nice detail I wanted to be really really sharp
and right now it's not extremely sharp
pretty good but I wanna steal a trick that I learnt from my friend Joel Grimes
to apply to this image so what i'll do here is I'm going to right click on this
and I'm going to edit this in Photoshop
in this is the last step I'm gonna edit a copy of this with Lightroom
adjustment so that way
I can play with it so now this is going to open up in Photoshop
and what I'll do is I'm going to increase this to full size and you can see we
have just lots of detail here
I'm going to create a copy of the background
and then I will create a filter going to go to
other and when to create a high pass filter
now this is sort of like a sharpening filter what I want to do here is
I wanna just my radius until I just see the outlines and the
edges of the objects that I'm trying to
sharpen so I'm gonna do this and take this radius down just a bit
I just want to be very very light you might not be able to see this
because the compression of this video that you're watching so this looks sorta like this
grey
outline over the top when I need to do is go to my Layers panel
change this to overlay
when I do that really makes this pop and if you want a stronger effect
then you create you adjust that radius so it's a little bit more
then what it was and now we can look at this image
in full resolution and look at that detail in this we have our highlights we
our shadows as you can see
every single thing in this image
it is just crystal clear and that is what I wanna see
in my HDR image and so if we played with this a little bit more
we'll go back over here to Lightroom are shown in the image that I
originally created now it's back here
in my folder here in my
HDR basilica here we go and this is the
finished product if I'd spent a little bit of time on this
this is how I like it to look so the tone mapping looks very natural
the color temperature looks very natural normally I would spend about an
hour 30 minutes to an hour dialing this all in and I'm sure you don't want to watch
me do that
by adjusting the sliders you can make this look like a photo that is
super realistic not overdone
well thats how I created my image of the Basilica of the National Vow now
remember there's more to talk about with HDR images
and you can find all that information at the Adorama Learning Center its totally free
so check it out
and don't forget you can subscribe to Adorama TV for free
and so that way you don't miss a single episode well thank you so much for
joining me day and I'll see you again
in the next episode
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