ProjectVISUAL

Well it’s time for a bit more photography I think, and this time it’s a tutorial session. Before we continue I’ll just say that the title is a tad misleading – you can’t get a true HDR image from one RAW file. It cant be done – impossible! You can however create pseudo-HDRs from on RAW file; keep reading to find out how! The last time I published a post on photography (Bringing a scene to life with tone mapping…) I had just discovered the world of HDR or High Dynamic Range photography and now I’m hooked on it! How often have your holiday snaps looked so promising on your camera’s LCD display only for you to get home, upload them to your computer and find that they actually suck? “Where’s all the vibrant colour gone?! These are not the shots I took! What the hell happened all my beautiful pictures?!!” are probably some of the exclaimations that come to mind. I know; the same nut kicker has happened to me a bazillion times and it blows (or sucks, whichever you prefer). In Bringing a scene to life with tone mapping… I quickly showed you one of my more successful attempts at creating an HDR image from three differently exposed images. I was going to post a tutorial of how I did it but since then I’ve managed to create an HDR image from a single RAW image, so now I’m going to tell you how. On top is the original RAW image. Directly below is the final HDR image. NO other images were used to create the HDR and the tools I used were: Adobe Lightroom, Photomatix, and Gimp.

If you’re interested to learn how this transformation is achieved, read on…

1. Get the RAW image.

Most digital cameras will allow you to shoot in its native RAW format. RAW is essentialy the unprocessed data collected from the image sensor in a digital camera, so if you are shooting in jpeg format (even at max resolution fine) you are immediately losing some visual info. It might not be much but it still counts. If you want the best possible results I’d recommend you shoot your subject in your cameras RAW format as we’re going to be extracting the maximum amount of data possible from the image to create the HDR photo. Do you see where I’m going here? Use RAW!

2. Post-processing in Lightroom

Once you have the single RAW image, you’re then going to do a bit of post-processing and create two similar images, only with different exposure settings. I used Lightroom for this but I’m sure you can use Apple Aperture (I couldn’t as it doesn’t support the S9600 .RAF format), or possibly Photoshop. In Lightroom import your image and then go to the Develop stage. There you can quickly change the exposure settings (I used +2 and -2) and export the newly exposed images as TIFF files under File – Export… Set the file format to TIFF and compression to “none”. Call the files whatever you want.

3. Making the magic in Photomatix

Now comes the cool stuff. Open Photomatix and select either HDR – Generate, or Automate – Batch Processing. I use the former as I’m only using three images here. Select your images and wait for Photmatix to check the exposure levels. If it gets them wrong just enter them manually by clicking on the number beside each image; they should be “0″ and +/- the exposure you selected in Lightroom. Click OK, make sure that ‘Take tone curve of color profile’ is ticked and then hit OK again to generate the HDR. It will look rather unimpressive at first. That’s because no tone mapping has been applied yet. In Photomatix go to HDR – Tone Mapping and the HDR image will be opened as shown below:

The best way to determine what each setting in Photomatix does it to set them at their extreme values to see the changes they make to your image. Personally I flood my photos with color even to the point of saturation sometimes. Once your happy with your settings hit apply and Photomatix wil create the HDR. It just needs to be saved now. I also used GIMP to convert from PNG to JPG (I keep my HDRs as PNG’s) and to add a bit of contrast to the JPG file to give the finished product as it is above. The essentials though are: a decent camera that can shoot a RAW format, a good post-processor like Aperture, Lightroom or Photoshop, and Photomatix. GIMP can be left as an after-thought.

So now you should know how it’s done, if not leave a comment and ask a question, otherwise get creating!

Related Articles:
What Is The Best Exposure Range For HDR Photos?
Creating Ultra Vibrant Tone-Mapped Surreal HDR Photos With Photomatix Pro