Posted by Stephen Kiernan, follow me on Twitter.

I’ve been experimenting with HDR post-processing for a little while now and I’ve already put up a few images that you can see at HDR Photography. I use Photomatix Pro to apply the tone mapping and while it does add some vibrant colour to what are often initially bland images, they still are not the super surreal, in your face, completely over the top photos that I thought I could achieve. A good example of what I’m talking about can be found at PhotoFencePhotography.com. Fortunately I realized that there’s a really easy way to this - it’s actually so simple that I’m amazed I didn’t realize it before. OK so if you’ve been to other parts of this site you would have come across the post Tutorial to create a High Dynamic Range Photo (HDR) from a single RAW image. Read it? OK lets move on then. Lightroom isn’t essential to create the different exposures; Photoshop is more than able to do this job for a RAW image. For this example I’m going to use a photo I took in Vienna; it’s of the Donner Fountain (Donner-Brunnen) found near St Stephen Cathedral. It’s the most famous fountain in Vienna and gives a great surreal effect once it’s been Photomatixified. You of course can use any image in your own library if you wish. Here’s the original picture….

I’ve uploaded it as jpg here but you should take your photos in whatever RAW format you camera has as you will have much more information within the image to play around with. So, like before create a number of differently exposed photos, I’ve taken five here (+2, +1, 0, -1, -2). This is done to extract the wide range of lights and darks that are available to you from a RAW image, since a RAW file contains all the information that the camera sensor recorded while the photo was taken. This is typically much more than if we were to take our pictures as jpgs, which are compressed.

I choose to make five differently exposed images here; you than do more or less if you prefer. I wouldn’t expect the final result to be significantly altered. OK, once these files are created, we open up Photomatix, and in the menu go to HDR -> Generate and select all our differently exposed images. Leave the settings at their defaults (but change the exposure values that Photomatix suggests if need be) and hit OK to generate the HDR. When that is done, in the Photomatix menu, select HDR -> Tone Mapping and we should get a more vibrant version of our original like below…

Now this looks more true to life - this is more like what I actually saw in Vienna - the wider range of tones, the shadows and the general warmth in the picture is much more appealing. However if we want to forgo realism for the moment, rather than closing the HDR image we just created we can very simply go back to the Photomatix menu and select HDR -> Tone Mapping again! Photomatix will tone map our already tone mapped picture and give us something like this…

Completely unrealistic but very cool none the less. The final result will depend a lot on the actual post-processing that we do in Photomatix (such as color saturation, light smoothing, microcontrast and micro-smoothing). As a quick guide, generally after tone mapping the image for the first time, keep light smoothing high, to reduce halos around objects, and colour saturation and strength near maximum to bring out the vibrancy. For the second tone map light smoothing can be reduced to bring out the halo effect, which gives the picture alot of its surrealism, but the color saturation may have to be dropped. As a final experiment, I tone mapped the image a third time but the only way really to make is look half decent was to drop the color saturation to zero! It looks rather bland here against the grey backdrop but the higher quality version looks pretty good I think!

Related Articles:

Tutorial to create a High Dynamic Range Photo (HDR) from a single RAW image.
Vienna

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